Sanctus

‘So it was a controlled fall.’

Arkadian went to the stainless-steel tray holding the cassock. He grabbed a set of tongs and peeled open the stiff material until he found one of the sleeves. ‘Look. Those rips you found at the wrists? They were for his hands. It meant he could pull his robe tight against his body – like a kind of wing.’ He dropped the sleeve and sorted through the grisly folds until he found the other cuts a few inches above the hem. ‘And these were for his feet.’ He dropped the material back down and turned to Reis. ‘That’s why he didn’t fall head-first. He didn’t jump off the mountain – he flew off it.’

Reis looked across at the broken body under the examination lights. ‘Then I’d say he really needs to work on his landings.’

Arkadian ignored him, following this new thought. ‘Maybe he thought he could reduce the speed of the fall enough to survive it. Or maybe …’

He pictured the monk again, his arms stretched out, his body tilted down, his head held steady, as if focusing on something, as if he was …

‘Aiming.’

‘What?’

‘I think he was aiming for a specific spot.’

‘Why on earth would he do that?’

It was a good question. Why aim somewhere if you were going to die wherever you landed? But then, death wasn’t his primary concern, it wasn’t nearly as important as … witnesses. ‘He was aiming because he wanted to land in our jurisdiction!’

Reis’s brow furrowed.

‘The Citadel is a state within a state,’ Arkadian explained. ‘Anything that side of the moat wall belongs to them; anything this side is our responsibility. He wanted to make sure he ended up on our side of the wall. He wanted all this to happen. He wanted public investigation. He wanted us to see all these cuts on his body.’

‘But why?’

‘I have absolutely no idea. But whatever it is, he thought it was worth dying for. His dying wish, literally, was to get away from that place.’

‘So what are you going to do when some big religious cheese comes calling, asking for his monk back? Give them a lecture on jurisdiction?’

Arkadian shrugged. ‘So far they haven’t even admitted he’s one of theirs.’

He glanced over at the gaping body of the monk, the body cavity now empty, the surgically precise scars round his neck, legs and arms still visible. Maybe the scars were some kind of message, and whoever came forward to claim the body would know what they meant.

Reis picked up a cardboard container from underneath the examination table, restarted the recording, and began squeezing the contents of the monk’s stomach into it. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘The major intestine contains very little, so our friend’s last supper wasn’t exactly a banquet. Looks like the last thing he ate was an apple and maybe some bread a while before that, which I’ll label and send for analysis. The stomach contents appear to be largely undigested, suggesting that his digestive system had wholly or partially shut down, indicating a high degree of ante-mortem stress. Wait a minute,’ he said, as something shifted inside the slippery membranes between his fingers. ‘There’s something else here.’

Arkadian stepped over to the table as something small and dark dropped into the soup of apple pulp and gastric juices. It looked like a curled-up strip of overcooked beef. ‘What on earth is that?’

Reis picked it up and moved across to the sink, knocking the long arm of the tap with his elbow and holding the object under the stream of water.

‘It appears to be a small strip of leather,’ he said, laying it down on a tray lined with a paper towel. ‘It was rolled up, maybe to make it easier to swallow.’ He took a set of tweezers and started opening it out.

‘He was missing a belt loop from his cassock, wasn’t he?’ Arkadian whispered.

Reis nodded.

‘I think we just found it.’

Reis moved it alongside a centimetre scale etched into the surface of the tray. Arkadian sent another picture to the case file. Reis flipped it over so he could photograph the other side and all the air seemed to be sucked from the room.

Neither of them moved.

Neither of them said anything.

Arkadian raised the camera.

The click of the shutter snapped Reis out of his trance.

He cleared his throat.

‘Having unrolled and cleaned the leather object, something appears to be scratched on its surface.’

He glanced up at Arkadian before continuing.

‘Twelve numbers, seemingly random.’

Arkadian stared down at them, his mind already racing. The combination for a lock? Some kind of code? Maybe they referred to a chapter and verse from the Bible and would spell out a word or a sentence that might shed light on things, possibly even the identity of the Sacrament. He checked the numbers again. ‘They’re not random,’ he said, reading the sequence from left to right. ‘Not random at all.’

He looked up at Reis.

‘That’s a telephone number,’ he said.

II

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Genesis 3:16

30

The primal screams echoed round the bright room with a desperate, animal quality that seemed out of place in the sleek modern setting of the New Jersey hospital.

Liv stood in the corner, watching Bonnie’s face contort in pain. Her phone had woken her a little after two in the morning, dragging her out of bed, into her car, and south on I-95 with all the empty trucks making their way out of New York City. It had been Myron; Bonnie’s waters had broken.

Another lung-deep scream tore through the room and she looked across at Bonnie squatting naked in the centre of the room, howling so hard that her face had gone purple and the cords in her neck stood out like high-tension cables. Myron held on, supporting one arm, while the midwife held the other. The howl ebbed slightly, making way for the incongruous sound of waves lapping against a beach. They flowed gently from a portable boom box in the corner.

In Liv’s nicotine-starved mind the supposedly soothing sounds of the seashore morphed into the tormenting crackle of cellophane being ripped off a fresh pack of Luckies. She craved a cigarette more than she had ever desired anything in her life. Hospitals always had that effect on her. The very fact you were expressly forbidden to do something made it almost irresistible to her. She was the same in churches.

Bonnie’s scream rose again, this time something between a moan and a growl. Myron stroked her back and made shushing noises like he was trying to calm a child who had woken from a terrible nightmare. Bonnie turned to him and in a low voice made raw from screaming panted a single word: ‘Arnica.’

Liv reached gratefully for her notebook to log the request and the time it was made. Arnica was also known as wolf’s bane or mountain tobacco and had been used since the dawn of time as a herbal remedy. Liv often used it herself to reduce bruising; it was also thought to alleviate the trauma of a long drawn out and painful childbirth. She found herself sincerely hoping this would prove to be true as she watched Myron fumbling with a small vial containing the tiny white sugar pills. The screaming started again and rose in pitch as another contraction arrived.

For God’s sake, take the Pethedine, Liv thought.

An advocate of the healing properties of plants she may have been; a masochist she most definitely was not. Bonnie’s screaming soared to a new zenith and her hand shot out to grab Myron, knocking the entire contents of the blue box on to the shiny vinyl floor.

Liv’s cell phone rang in her pocket.

She felt for the ‘off’ button through the thick cotton of her cargo pants and pressed hard, hoping to catch it before it rang again. No one gave the slightest indication they even remembered she was there. She fished the phone out and glanced down at the scratched grey screen, made sure it was definitely off, then returned her attention, just in time, to the unfolding story in the room.