Holy Blood

by Kim Fleet

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Being ordinary. She changed her name to reinvent herself.’ Xanthe shrugged. ‘We all do it, don’t we? Only Lewis wouldn’t let her forget who she really was, under the skin.’

  The rain had not improved the smell of damp in her office, nor had her absence from it for the past two days. Eden hefted the door open and quickly made a pot of coffee, letting the aromas do battle for supremacy. It was cold and dank inside, and she switched on the electric heater, adding the stink of singeing dust to the ambience. L’eau de brassick PI.

  Logging on to her computer, she went to a credit ratings site, and ran a search on Lewis Jordan. That thirty thousand pounds came from somewhere. His credit report made interesting, though depressing, reading. He had numerous debts from store cards, credit cards and bank loans, plus an eye-watering mortgage for his London flat, and he’d defaulted on all of them at some point in the past few months. Robbing Peter to pay Paul; more going out on credit repayments than was coming in, so he juggled which ones he paid and which he left fallow for a month or two.

  Over the past few months, Lewis had applied for loans of varying amounts, from fifty thousand pounds to a hundred thousand pounds, and several banks and lenders had run credit searches on him. None of them had been approved, and his credit score had diminished each time. At the bottom of the list was a credit search carried out about a month previously. It wasn’t done by a bank or lender, but carried only by an identifier number, similar to the one Eden herself used as a private investigator. Time to find out who it was.

  She rang the credit reference agency and summoned her credentials from when she worked in Revenue and Customs. No one had been diligent enough to cancel all of her old accesses when she died and she soon got through the initial checks using her old username and passwords.

  ‘I can see that someone ran a check on my person of interest,’ she told the operative at the other end. ‘I need a reverse ID on who ran the search. Yes, I’ll wait.’

  She recited the identifier number and listened to a tinny version of ‘The Magic Flute’ until a voice came back on the line.

  ‘It was a private investigator search,’ she was told. ‘Name of Bernard Mulligan, offices in Birmingham. Help you with anything else?’

  ‘Not right now,’ Eden said. ‘Thanks for your help.’

  She hung up, her mind churning. A month before Lewis died, a private investigator ran a credit check on him. Part of a routine financial and pattern of life analysis? But if so, who was the client, and why were they interested in Lewis? Or did Lewis himself employ Bernard Mulligan to fossick around and see who was sending the poison pen letters? He might well have run a quick financial check on his flashy client.

  A quick Internet search brought up Bernard Mulligan’s office address and phone number. A phone call later and Eden was heading up the M5 to Birmingham.

  Mulligan’s office was in the old jewellery quarter of Birmingham, a part of the city that Eden adored for its Victorian buildings and tiny workshops. She could easily imagine how it was in its heyday: a scramble of little shops, the glare of blowtorches and the smell of hot metal. Leaving her car in the multi-storey car park, she checked her phone for directions and walked past the old cemetery with its catacombs to a tall, narrow Victorian building at the end of the street. A jigsaw of plaques beside the front door showed Mulligan shared the building with a tax accountant, a web designer and a recruitment firm.

  She opened the door into a clean, plain hallway with its original Victorian tiles in black, red, green and yellow. A sign pointed her up the stairs to Mulligan’s office. When she knocked, the door swung open and she faced a short, stocky man in grey slacks, white shirt and black V-necked sweater. He was in his late fifties, she guessed, and had pepper and salt hair cropped close to his head, and the biggest, droopiest bags under his eyes she’d ever seen, giving him the look of a basset hound.

  ‘Mr Mulligan?’ she said. ‘I’m Eden Grey. I called earlier.’

  He stepped aside for her to enter a large, high-ceilinged room painted in cream with a biscuit-coloured carpet and oatmeal soft furnishings, like a counsellor’s therapy room. Discrete, pallid watercolours were placed exactly central on each wall. There was a filing cabinet, a modern desk and a chair specially fitted for lower back problems.

  ‘You’ve just driven here from Cheltenham?’ Bernard asked. He had a pleasant, deep voice with traces of a Geordie accent. ‘You’ll be needing a cup of tea.’

  She waited a second for him to offer coffee, too, and when it didn’t materialise, said, ‘Please. White, no sugar.’

  ‘NATO standard minus two,’ Bernard said, clicking on a kettle in a small kitchen unit in the corner. ‘Copy that.’

  He brewed a strong cup of tea and indicated they should sit on the comfortable chairs at the far end of the room rather than at the desk. A low table placed between the chairs was piled with folders.

  ‘Your name rang a bell so I went back through my files,’ Bernard said. He picked up a pen from the top of the folders and clicked it on and off.

  ‘I wondered how you knew I’d come from Cheltenham,’ Eden said. On the phone she’d requested an interview with him and given no further details.

  Bernard tapped the side of his nose. ‘I am a detective,’ he said, deadpan.

  Eden decided she liked him. ‘My turn,’ she said. ‘You were in the forces, then joined the police. Right?’

  ‘Bang on.’ He gave her an appraising look. ‘Usual route for private eyes, but you’re a different kind of fish altogether.’ He slapped his hands on his knees. ‘We won’t go there. To business. How can I help?’

  ‘I have a client, Lewis Jordan, who engaged me to investigate some poison pen letters. I’d only just taken the brief when he turned up dead in his hotel room. The police are playing the robbery-gone-wrong line, but it stinks of murder.’

  ‘Irritating when the client gets bumped off before you can invoice them.’

  ‘Lewis had huge debts, yet he paid his mother thirty grand not long before he died. When I ran a credit check I saw you’d also run a financial check on him, and I wondered why.’

  Bernard slurped his tea. ‘It’s a funny one, Eden. A month ago someone came into my office – no prior phone call – and asked me to run background checks on a list of people. When I started digging, I twigged they were all connected to that find at Hailes Abbey earlier in the year.’

  ‘Can I see?’

  Bernard opened the top file and took out a sheet of paper. A list of names was typed on it, with brief descriptions. She looked down the list with rising shock. Aidan, Mandy, Trev, Jocasta, Xanthe, the sound and technical guys, Lewis, and Eden herself were on the list. Bernard was right: everyone connected with the skeleton found at Hailes.

  Bernard tapped the files. ‘So I got cracking.’

  ‘What was your client looking for?’

  ‘He didn’t say exactly, but it seemed to me he was looking for a weak point to exploit. He wanted me to go into finances, family background, sexual past, everything. I think he wanted to find leverage somewhere.’

  ‘For what purpose?’

  Bernard shrugged. ‘Never said. He was a close one alright. Tight as a gnat’s chuff. But he twitched a bit when he saw Lewis Jordan’s file.’

  ‘What did you turn up on Lewis?’

  ‘Who he really was, his brushes with our boys in blue, and his financials. You saw them: a lot of loan applications that got turned down. Looked to me like a man who was desperate for money.’ Bernard drained his cup and banged it down on the table. ‘Yours was interesting, too.’ He held her gaze for a moment. ‘I couldn’t find a thing about you. It’s almost as if you don’t exist.’

  She stared right back and didn’t answer. ‘Who was your client?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘You must have!’

  ‘Not a sausage. He turned up without an appointment and paid a deposit in cash up front.’

  ‘So how did you report back to h
im? You must have had a contact number.’

  ‘He told me he’d be back in ten days’ time and expected results by then. Paid handsomely, too.’

  ‘How could you take a brief from a client who won’t even give you his name?’

  ‘Times are tough, Eden. Sometimes you do stuff that stinks a bit. And running background checks on people isn’t dodgy.’

  ‘It is if you’re not sure how they’re going to use the information.’

  ‘My responsibility began and ended with the brief.’ Bernard collected up the empty mugs and carried them over to the kitchen unit. ‘I can’t be the conscience of all my clients.’

  ‘When did the client first approach you?’

  Bernard licked his forefinger and riffled through the pages of a desk diary. ‘21st September. He was back here on the 1st of October for my report.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Tall, gaunt looking. Early forties I’d say but not ageing well. And that air that powerful people have. You know, they expect to be obeyed.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Not really, he was just a suit,’ Bernard said, then laughed, ‘had a sweet tooth though, ate a whole bag of sweeties while he was here.’

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  Thursday, 29 October 2015

  10:00 hours

  A pall of mist veiled the ruins of Hailes Abbey. Aidan stood at the entrance, breathing deeply, a profound peace settling over him. He’d escaped for a few hours from the seething passions that smouldered in the Cultural Heritage Unit. Mandy was still mooning and lovesick; Trev was still trying to fix her up with the guy from the lab; and Lisa … well, he mostly fled the office to avoid Lisa.

  Lisa had strutted in first thing that morning and announced she was going to re-examine the skeleton and scrutinise the isotope analysis, letting everyone know about the work she’d done excavating a war grave a couple of years ago.

  Mandy had snapped, ‘You’re not my boss, Lisa, you’re just a paid consultant,’ when Lisa had ordered her to make her a coffee and take dictation of her observations on the skeleton. Even Trev had rolled his eyes when Lisa swanned around in surgical scrubs, ostentatiously snapping on rubber gloves and declaring that she was ‘going back to the victim’.

  To his immense relief, Lisa was giving him the cold shoulder after he’d bollocked her the day before. But the silent treatment was getting embarrassing: Trev and Mandy noticed that Lisa sucked in her breath and turned away whenever Aidan addressed her. It was not good for his dignity as Director.

  A job he might not have much longer, he thought, ruefully. Not with a possibly priceless artefact missing and the fact he had still not reported the theft to the police. The thought of that interview filled him with dread. It was as Eden said: the theft of the Blood meant he had a motive for confronting Lewis Jordan, and he didn’t have an alibi for the night Lewis died. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on him: if he’d given in to Lisa and spent the night with her as she’d wanted, he’d have his alibi and his origami swan couldn’t have turned up in Lewis’s room to point the finger of suspicion at him.

  He took a quick walk around the Abbey ruins, glancing into the gulley where he’d excavated the skeleton. The Abbey’s water flowed off the hills behind it into several fish ponds, then ran into drainage channels to flush away the waste from the latrines. He squinted back down the line of the drainage ditch, seeing the path the water must have taken. It led back to the site of the old infirmary. Nothing remained of it now except a number of grassy lumps suggesting where it might have been.

  Time to get on with it. He walked over to the visitor centre and through to the storage rooms at the back. The Abbey kept facsimiles of several documents relating to its history; the originals were housed in the National Archives. He arranged his notebook and pen on the table, fetched the records and started to scan the text. After an hour, he’d sketched out the buildings and drainage channel and calculated that the skeleton was most likely dumped in the infirmary fish pond, then heavy rains washed the remains into the drainage channel, and eventually into the open gulley where Eden found it.

  Funny how remains can stay hidden for centuries and then come to light, sometimes resisting waves of archaeology and then making their presence known. Spooky, at times, how you dig and re-dig an area and find nothing, then go back and reveal treasure, almost as if the finds themselves had decided the time was right for them to make a reappearance. Aidan recalled a dig when he was an undergraduate. The area had been dug by students every summer for over twenty years, and all that came to light were shards of pottery and the occasional musket ball. Yet on the last day of the dig, when he was checking the site for abandoned tools, he felt a strong urge to go back and look at a post hole he’d excavated earlier. All that remained was a dark circle of earth marking where the post had been. He’d dug it out and knew there was nothing left to find, yet he felt compelled to go back and dig again. His trowel scraped over the circle, again and again, and suddenly chimed against something solid. He took the layer back and there it was, a golden torc. A band of twisted golden threads that had decided to reveal itself after a thousand years hiding in the soil.

  And now this skeleton at Hailes had come to light, after being buried for nearly five hundred years, and he was no closer to identifying who it might be or what had got him killed.

  Aidan wandered out and found the site curator. ‘Have you got any records about what happened to the Abbey after the Dissolution?’ he asked. ‘Did any of the monks stay here?’

  ‘It was all sold off or given away,’ the curator said. ‘We’ve got some plans from the 1570s, when the west range was developed. There might be something there.’

  She fetched the records and Aidan holed himself away again. The plans were dated 1576 and showed how the Abbey had changed since it had been dissolved. Much of the stone, lead and glass had gone, and most of the Abbey buildings had been demolished. The large infirmary buildings were gone, with only a cottage remaining, to the side of a physic garden. The west wing of the Abbey, which had housed the lay brothers, was being converted into a manor house.

  Attached was a planting scheme for a new garden at Coughton Hall, dated 1569. A comment scrawled on the top stated, ‘Following the pattern of the physic gardens at Hailes’. He studied the plans: the garden was walled, and shaped like the temples he’d seen in Malta with a narrow entrance opening into a wide, circular, womb-like area. Details were given in tiny writing, but he made out some of the names: rosemary, lavender, Alchemilla, sage, sorrel, feverfew.

  His mind fastened onto the patterns and symmetry of the garden, and the anxiety of the past few days ebbed. His mind always sought order, and he often found himself counting over and over again, seeking the middle letter in words, rearranging tiles and wallpaper patterns into regular blocks. There was comfort in counting, in regular patterns, and this planting scheme was perfect.

  The symmetry soothed him, and before he knew it he was counting. One sage, ten Alchemilla, one lavender; one sage, ten Alchemilla, one lavender. Rosemary, sage, three Alchemilla and a lavender on the narrow path up to the wide circular bed. Five sets of Alchemilla, sage and lavender around the circle.

  He stretched and yawned. Lunch time. He left the archives and went to his car, and listened to the car radio while he ate a sandwich. Tavener’s The Protecting Veil filled the space, the notes soaring, the vibrato on the cello mesmerising him into an altered consciousness. It was a piece of music he loved intensely, holding his breath at the beauty and transcendence of the piece. The first time he’d heard it, he’d found tears in his eyes as his mind whispered, unbidden, ‘This is the voice of God.’

  It never failed to affect him the same way, no matter how many times he heard it. He leaned his head back against the headrest and let the music inhabit him, and for the second time in as many days his mind filled with old, familiar words, long unused yet undimmed. Our Father, who art in heaven. I believe in God, the Father A
lmighty. Hail Mary, full of grace.

  Tavener ended and Autumn from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons started, yet the words continued to chase each other. Suddenly the pattern he’d been studying for the past hour resolved. He had to check whether he was right. He scrunched up his sandwich wrapper, scrambled out of his car and sprinted back to the archives.

  He spread the garden plans out on the table and studied them again. One sage, ten Alchemilla, one lavender. Five sets. He took up his pencil and jotted down the pattern, assigning a new identity to each plant. Now he knew he was right, and ran to find the curator.

  ‘Can I check something on the Internet?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure, what is it?’

  ‘What sort of plant is Alchemilla?’

  She smiled. ‘I love that plant, I’ve got tons of it in my garden. Lady’s mantle.’

  ‘Lady’s mantle.’ He leaned against the doorframe as ideas rushed at him. ‘Come and have a look at this planting scheme. It’s got a secret code embedded in it.’

  She left her desk and followed him back to the archives. ‘How exciting! What have you found?’

  ‘There’s a pattern to this planting,’ Aidan said, breathlessly. ‘Each plant stands for a prayer. As you walk around the garden, you say the prayer.’ He showed her the code. ‘It’s the rosary,’ he said. ‘The garden plan is the rosary.’

  ‘Good God, you’re right,’ the curator said, poring over the plans. ‘But this garden was planted in 1569, based on the garden here …’

  ‘When practising Catholicism and owning a rosary were illegal,’ Aidan finished for her. He glanced back at the plans. ‘You had a heretic in your midst.’

  His spirits were light as he parked his old black Audi in the space outside the Cultural Heritage Unit; spirits that sank as he saw Lisa’s car in his parking space. It was a dinky electric-blue Mazda MX5, a metaphor for Lisa herself: dainty, fast and uncompromising. When he went inside, she was in the common room, sipping a takeaway coffee and regaling Trev and Mandy with stories from the war graves investigation she’d done.