Black Hearts Rising (Wardens of the Black Heart Book 2)

by Rob Campbell

  “I can only apologise again. I received the information in good faith,” Lester replied with what appeared to be a chuckle.

  “I’m glad you’re finding this funny.”

  At this point, Monkey grabbed my arm, trying to get me to take a seat.

  “It’s okay, Lorna. It’s not worth arguing about.” This was a turn-up. I remember more than one occasion when it had been Monkey demanding an explanation from Lester, but ever since the events of last year, Monkey had become a firm believer in Lester’s cause. I knew that, like me, he wanted answers, but he didn’t appear to want to challenge the old man on it. Maybe he was still brooding over the situation with his uncle.

  “Do you not remember the embarrassment? It was… it was… it was embarrassing!” I blurted, embarrassed that I couldn’t think of a better word than embarrassing.

  “I know,” soothed Monkey, nodding his understanding. I sat down on the plush chair, seething and wondering what to say next.

  “Well, you know I’ve always said that if you are unhappy with the arrangements…” Clearly, Lester sensed that my silence was an opportunity to wrest control of the conversation back in his favour. He also assumed that, despite my anger, I loved the intrigue too much to simply walk away. He was correct.

  “I’m sorry, Lester. I don’t want to fall out.” I felt the anger slowly draining out of me. “It’s just that you keep telling us that your sources of information are sound, but you’ve never told us how you get it.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, take The Frenchman for example. One minute you don’t know where it is, what it looks like or who has it. The next thing you know, Monkey’s being lowered in through the ceiling and snatching it from the apartment of some bloke that you managed to track down. How do you produce this information so fast?”

  “Oh, I see!” exclaimed Lester, rubbing his hands together theatrically. “You think that I’m just making all of this up for the fun of it. Or maybe withholding vital information from you. A bit of fun for an old man, giving a couple of youngsters the run-around.”

  It did seem like that some of the time, but naturally, my response was, “Of course not.”

  “No, no, it’s a fair comment. Perhaps if I could show you where I got this information from, you might give me a little more leeway?”

  I looked at Monkey, then Frank. Frank waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. I looked back to Lester, his face an unreadable mask.

  “I don’t know,” I responded, not sure what he wanted me to say.

  A further three seconds of his glare was enough to make me feel uncomfortable, and I was relieved when he made his way to the door and walked out.

  “Have I upset him?” I asked Frank.

  “Don’t worry,” he replied reassuringly.

  Without warning, Lester poked his head back through the door. “Are you coming, or what?”

  * * *

  Lester marched us down the steps at the back of his house and across the lawn where we’d had a spot of lunch on the day that we’d returned his coin. He opened a latch in a wooden gate at the bottom of the garden, slipping through into the trees beyond. This was new territory for us, and I glanced at Monkey; the look on his face indicated that he was as intrigued as I was. Frank gently closed the gate behind us.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Not far now, you’ll see.”

  I knew that Lester’s home occupied a fair bit of land, but this area of private woodland was well hidden from the house itself. We descended a steep set of stone steps that took us further into the trees, daylight filtering through the spaces vacated by the autumn leaves that carpeted the path. After a brisk walk through the trees, we passed over an ornamental wooden bridge and arrived at what was obviously our destination.

  I wasn’t prepared for the sight that greeted us. It was as if somebody had cleared the immediate area of all foliage and placed an industrial warehouse in the middle of the woods.

  “What on earth…?” I found myself saying.

  “Not very pretty to look at,” explained Lester, “but as my mother used to say, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.” He punched a series of digits into a keypad before hauling the door open. Holding out his free hand, he gestured for us to enter what, until this point, had been another hidden corner of his empire. Frank led the way, and we followed him into the dark interior, Lester bringing up the rear. Once inside, we found ourselves in a sterile corridor that gave off a slight whiff of paint, at the end of which were two doors that faced each other.

  Having closed the outer door behind us, Lester pushed his way to the front of the group, making his way to the door on the left, but as he reached for the handle, the door snapped open, and a man stepped out. He had the look of a student, dressed in baggy jeans and a black T-shirt that featured what looked like the logo of some heavy metal band.

  “Sorry,” he said apologetically as he brushed past Lester before opening the door opposite and stepping into the blackness beyond.

  “That’s Jason,” said Lester, by way of explanation.

  “Who’s Jason?” Monkey asked.

  “He works for me.” Lester grinned like he knew something that we didn’t, which was obviously the case here. Despite being intrigued by where he was taking us, I felt irritated all over again. Was this some game on Lester’s part? Some way to show us that he was in control and that we shouldn’t ruffle his feathers? He looked at Monkey and me from his position in the open doorway, an unreadable expression etched on his face, but I suspected that he was taking some perverse pleasure in our bewilderment.

  I watched the other door close behind Jason and struggled to contain the thought that we might not be as significant to Lester’s organisation as we’d thought. From the brief glimpse of Jason, I’d say that he was barely five years older than me, maybe just out of University. We’d spent months with Lester and the Reverend, discussing the threat of Charles Gooch and the likely hiding place of The Frenchman. I thought that Monkey and I were special because we’d returned his precious coin; isn’t that what Lester had told us?

  It was as if Lester was reading my thoughts. “What? You thought that you were the only young people working for me?”

  “No, but…” I started but was unsure of how to finish the sentence.

  Lester grunted out a short laugh. “Young people. Always think that the world revolves around them,” he muttered. “Well, prepare for a surprise, my young friends,” he said, stepping through the open door.

  “What’s he playing at?” asked a bewildered Monkey, turning to Frank for an explanation.

  “Relax, he’s just having you on.” Frank put a consoling arm on Monkey’s shoulder before shepherding him towards the door. “You should know by now that he likes to be in control.”

  It was true. Sometimes, Lester came across as a showman from another age, taking great delight at some surprising reveal to the audience. But having told us the story of how his coin had saved both his father’s life and his own, and then let us in on the secret of his game of cat and mouse with the Wardens of the Black Heart and the hunt for a Napoleon toy soldier, I thought that all the surprises were behind us. As I followed Lester through the open door, the scene beyond showed that this wasn’t the case at all.

  I had to remind myself that we were effectively in Lester’s back garden and not some hi-tech business park. The lighting was muted, giving the ambience of a cinema before the lights were fully down. Two rows of computer workstations stretched down the length of the building, one on either side. There must have been about twenty people either staring at their screens or typing at the keyboard, and although I spotted a couple of middle-aged men, most of the operators were young student-types like Jason. Beyond the furthest workstation, I noticed a short set of metal steps that led upwards, and it was only then that I became aware of the large glass panel to my right. Behind the glass, slightly above the tops of the computers that ran down the right-hand side of the ro
om, was a wooden table at which a man and a woman sat. They appeared to be studying some papers, maybe computer printouts.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” asked Lester, beaming with pride.

  “What is this place?” I replied in a hushed voice.

  “It’s where I get all of my information – good or bad,” he said pointedly, clearly referring to my earlier complaints. “These people work tirelessly on my behalf. They’re like digital miners, sifting through countless reports, looking for signs, chasing leads.”

  “What are they looking for?” asked Monkey, but I’d already figured that bit out by now, my brain finally recovering from the sensory assault.

  “Clues. The pieces of heaven. The Wardens of the Black Heart.”

  “Exactly,” Lester confirmed.

  “And who are they?” I asked, gesturing to the people sitting behind the glass panel.

  “They’re my experts. When the good people on the floor come up with something that looks interesting, they take it upstairs,” he said, pointing at the glass. “If my experts agree with their initial findings, then they pass it on to me or the Reverend. In fact, that’s how he ended up in Shrewsbury. He’s looking into reports of a so-called lucky umbrella.”

  “A lucky umbrella?” repeated a puzzled Monkey.

  “Not something that you need to worry about,” said Lester dismissively. “Which is exactly why I need all of these people. It’s a big job.”

  I looked at the rows of people at their workstations. “Do all of these people know what they are looking for?” I thought about our own initiation into Lester’s world – how it took a while for us to discover the true nature of his search. “I mean, do they know about Charles Gooch and the Wardens of the Black Heart?”

  “Alright! Keep it down!” Lester hissed, seemingly answering my question without the need for further elaboration. If any of the people down here heard me, they gave no indication; many of them were wearing headphones anyway. “They do,” he added, jabbing his thumb at his experts behind the glass. “But the people on the floor are only told what they need to know in any given case.”

  So, it would appear that Monkey and I were special after all. We might be part of one big team that was much larger than we could have possibly known, but the fact that we knew about the danger posed by Charles Gooch and the Wardens, and judging by Lester’s reaction to my last comment, the people seated around us didn’t, put us on a higher footing within his organisation. At least that was what I liked to believe.

  “Well, I didn’t expect that,” said Monkey as Frank drove us back to Culverton Beck.

  Frank’s smirk was visible in the wing mirror. “A man of surprises is our Lester.”

  “Look, I’m sorry if we put you in an uncomfortable position before,” I said, thinking back to my heated questioning of Lester in his study. I’d been so angry, so desperate for an explanation as to why our visit to the British Museum had been such a shambles, that I hadn’t considered the implications for Frank. Still, I couldn’t complain about the outcome; we’d come for answers, and we’d certainly been given some.

  “Forget it, it’s no problem,” said Frank, his eyes never leaving the road. “Mr Hawkstone drives me mad sometimes, but like I said, I owe him a lot.”

  “I know, I understand, but you shouldn’t let him push you around.” Frank had always been kind to Monkey and me, and I didn’t like the thought of him always being subservient to his millionaire master. Sure, Lester had helped him out with a job, but had Frank stepped out of one prison and into another? One of walls and bars for another controlled by money and power.

  After he’d dropped us back in town, I watched him drive away in the BMW. I suppose that his job did have some perks.

  “What did you think of all that?” I asked Monkey.

  “Dunno. Seems like he has a lot of people working for him.”

  “Didn’t help us with the British Museum though, did it? His so-called experts must have thought that the connection with the Incan relic was worth following up.”

  “Maybe,” Monkey said half-heartedly. “Not worth worrying about anymore, is it?”

  “I suppose not.” But when I thought about all those people in the warehouse, spending countless hours researching God knows what, and the amount of effort that Lester must have gone to in order to pull the whole thing together in the first place, I had the feeling that his enterprise wouldn’t be grinding to a halt anytime soon, regardless of whether we were involved or not.

  Chapter 4

  My new timetable gave me a half-two finish on Mondays, and with Monkey getting out of school forty minutes later, it was a good time for everybody to catch up before the Culverton Beck Recorder office closed at six o’clock.

  At the end of the previous summer, I’d returned to the newspaper office (where I’d spent my work experience) to see if they could help us out with the coin that Monkey had found in the stream. Little did we know that this would be the start of our rollercoaster ride with Lester. Since then, we’d arranged to meet up regularly; I wanted to keep my hand in at the office with a view to employment in the future, and I think that Mick, the editor, saw Monkey and me as some lucky charm. He always used to bemoan the lack of local stories, but we’d certainly given his team plenty to write about in the past twelve months.

  Despite their partial involvement in the chain of events that our finding the coin had kicked off – reporter Anja Kasana initially accompanying us to Lester’s mansion at that first meeting, and Mick narrowly avoiding death from a falling piano in an incident that may or may not have been related to yet another coin – they knew nothing about Charles Gooch and the Wardens of the Black Heart. As far as they were concerned, Monkey and I were simply helping Lester Hawkstone with a humble ‘lost property recovery’ business. If they found this in any way suspicious, they weren’t letting on.

  “How are you finding college?” Anja asked.

  “Not so difficult for now, but everybody tells me that it’s a lot harder than GCSE.”

  “Oh, it is, don’t you worry about that. But you’re a bright spark, you’ll do well.”

  I smiled back at Anja, hoping that she was right. I was proud of my ten GCSEs, including some A’s and A stars. I was just sorry that Dad wasn’t here to share my results.

  “So, what’s the big news this week, Mick?” asked Monkey enthusiastically.

  Mick barked out a humourless laugh. “Not as exciting as the stories you and Lorna served up last year, that’s for sure.” He threw his pen onto the desk, where it landed on a jotter pad. “Still, there’s always your mate,” he said, staring at Monkey.

  “My mate?”

  “Yeah. The vicar.”

  Monkey gulped, his eyebrows arching. “Why, what does he want?”

  “Some replacement roof tiles,” quipped Neil Martin from the back of the office, without raising his eyes from his computer screen. Monkey glanced over at Neil before slumping in the seat opposite Mick’s desk. It wasn’t too difficult to figure out the reason for his apprehension. In his daring rescue of Chester the cat from the church roof, on the day that I’d introduced him to my friends at the Recorder, Monkey had managed to dislodge a few roof tiles. In the grand scheme of things, this was a small price to pay for saving the life of a trapped animal, but office humour being what it was, Mick and Neil couldn’t help ribbing Monkey about the incident from time to time, and like a helpless fool, he usually fell for it.

  “Ignore him,” Mick said reassuringly. “He’s in one of those moods again. No, seems like the vicar is having a few problems with his congregation.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Really?” I found the thought of the parishioners of St Stephen’s causing problems for their vicar highly amusing. “Why, what are they doing? Stealing from the collection?”

  “Nothing like that, but Anja’s interviewed him this week…” Mick gestured for his star reporter to continue.

  “Seems that he’s struggling to cope with the number of visitor
s to the vicarage,” Anja explained. “He told me that in an average week, he used to get one or two. You know, people struggling with their faith, seeking reassurance after some life-altering event, or even dumb things like asking for advice on how much money to put in the collection on a Sunday.”

  “Depends on how many new tiles he needs on his roof,” Neil said casually. Mick gave him a disapproving stare, shaking his head slowly.

  “Isn’t that part of a vicar’s job?” I asked.

  “Of course it is,” Anja agreed, tucking a long strand of black hair behind her ear. “But since the summer, he said that the number of visitors has increased dramatically; sometimes, he sees as many as three or four a day.”

  This time it was Mick’s turn for a quip. “Can’t he average it out over the year?”

  “It’s not just the number of visits though. It’s the reason for the visits that are disturbing him.”

  “I’m still struggling to see the story here.” Mick sounded exasperated. “Vicar has congregation with problems is hardly front-page material, is it?”

  Anja laughed, waving her finger from me to Monkey. “You’ve just been spoilt by the adventures of these two!”

  “Maybe,” he conceded. “Carry on. Why are his flock needing their good shepherd?”

  “The way he tells it, some of them are experiencing extremely vivid dreams. Dark angels, visions of fire, real end-of-the-world stuff.”

  “We are talking about the group of pensioners who frequent that place across the road, aren’t we?” Mick asked, jabbing his thumb towards the window, an air of disbelief apparent in his tone.

  “I know. Hard to believe, isn’t it? But he seems concerned. Apparently, two or three of them are having the same nightmare. Something about a fireball coming out of the sky.”

  Mick appeared to have run out of quips now, and although Neil had stopped typing his latest story and was staring at Anja, he didn’t appear to be ready to toss another barb across the fence. Mick shook his head once more, leaning back in his chair with a sigh. “Twenty years without a decent story. Then these two turn up, give me a whole season’s worth of material, and now some mass hysteria is breaking out amongst the town’s older generation. You can’t make it up!”