The Demon Code (25 page)
‘Did I just hear a subliminal love story, John?’ Kennedy asked. ‘No, I know, a gentleman never tells. Listen, this is great. Really. If I owed you a pint before, I owe you a brewery now.’
‘Distillery, please. My poison of choice is usquebaugh.’
‘Single malt or blended?’
‘Surprise me. But not too far north. The winters are murder on my arthritis.’
Kennedy hung up and made some more calls. The last of these was to Rush.
‘So now what?’ he asked her. ‘You’re going to France?’
‘Already booked. It’s a long haul. Eurostar to Paris, then regular train out to Rennes and another fifty miles from there in a rental car. I’ll be back tomorrow.’
‘You should take me along.’ Rush kept his tone light and sardonic, but she could hear the yearning. ‘You’ll need someone to stand on the running board and take potshots at them if they catch up with you again.’
‘Yeah,’ Kennedy told him, ‘but I can’t afford your fare.’
Or any more deaths on my conscience.
‘See what you can dig up about Johann Toller’s life,’ she suggested.
‘His life, Kennedy?’
‘Yeah. Think about it. I chase the work, you chase the man. We’re the horns of the buffalo, Ben.’
‘You’re the horns of the buffalo. I’m the swishing tail of the buffalo, swatting away a few flies. The horns of the buffalo don’t look stuff up on Wikipedia. Because that’s what you’re asking me to do.’
‘I’m serious,’ Kennedy said. ‘I think we can assume that Toller is important to the Judas People for some reason. If we knew who he was, we might have a chance of figuring out what that reason is.’
Rush still wasn’t happy, but he allowed himself to be persuaded. And Kennedy didn’t begrudge the time it took to persuade him because he was essentially right about her motives. She was sending him to do make-work while she got on with the investigation.
That was the plan, anyway.
As far as the internet was concerned, Johann Toller was an enigma. But buried in the search engine dross, Rush found a few nuggets of fact. One of these was an encyclopedia entry that appeared again and again, endlessly recycled from one site to another with no citation of the original author.
Johann Toller (????–1660), rose to prominence as a member of the Fifth Monarchy movement, a group of religious and political dissenters in seventeenth-century England with links to similar groups spread across Continental Europe. Little is known about his early life. Toller wrote several books and pamphlets criticising the post-revolutionary government of Oliver Cromwell for its failure to legislate for complete religious freedom. He was executed in 1660 after a failed attempt to assassinate Sir Gilbert Gerard, the former paymaster of the Parliamentary Army.
Wherever Rush looked, that same bald summary stared back at him. Nobody bothered to list Toller’s several works, or to say anything further about how the man had lived and died.
Switching to IMAGES, he found that a single picture predominated. It wasn’t a picture of Toller, it was a reproduction of the frontispiece of his book. Below the title, there was a carving or etching of a hill with a small town nestled at its base. It looked vaguely familiar.
The picture was captioned with a few words in a very ornate, almost unreadable typeface.
De agoni ventro veni, atque de austio terrae patente.
Rush parsed them as foreign and almost gave up at that point, but he fed them back into Babelfish to see what came out.
Out of the belly of the beast I come, and from the open mouth of the Earth.
He looked up the Fifth Monarchists and found out they were just one of about a hundred radical religious movements in seventeenth-century England, routinely persecuted and marginalised for their beliefs. They didn’t sound that radical at all to Rush, but he got lost among the details. Mostly they just seemed to be saying that the second coming of Christ would happen at 2 p.m. on Tuesday. Or maybe three in the morning on Thursday. Or watch this space. Hadn’t every age had its end-of-the-world nut-jobs? Or was it something that happened cyclically, like locusts?
At this point he struck a richer lode of data from a man named Robert Blackborne, another member of the Fifth Monarchy movement. Blackborne had all kinds of anecdotes about Toller. Like, he claimed to have been ‘born in darkness and delivered into light’, and to have regular conversations with angels. And despite his accent and manner of speech, Blackborne seemed sure that Toller was born somewhere exotic, because he had this peculiar way of making the sign of the cross, which he tried to make the other Fifth Monarchists adopt.
He put his hand to his throat, thence to his heart, and his stomach, and so in a circle back to where it began. And when I tasked him with this, and shewed him the right way, he said the blessing
was thus practised by the angels in high heaven, and he could not choose but to honour it.
Blackborne also kind of had an origin story for Toller. It seemed he was travelling through the Alps this one time, and he fell down a ravine and almost died.
He was sore wounded, and likewise constrained in a strait and terrible place, that he thought he would not see another day. So he commended his soul to God, and gave himself to solemn prayer, that he might prepare himself to stand before the seat of judgment.
But then an angel appeared and told Toller eternal truths, which he felt he had to pass on to the rest of humanity.
Rush copied it all into a master file. He was starting to feel like he was getting somewhere, and he considered walking over to the British Library and seeing what he could turn up there – ideally under a false name, given what had happened to everyone else who expressed an interest in Toller’s life and works.
Then it occurred to him that he had another option. It was stupid on the face of it, but ridiculously easy to do.
He went down to Room 37. Three times along the way, he passed police either standing and talking or walking in a different direction, but they only acknowledged him with wordless nods.
He swiped himself into the room and went straight to the box that Alex Wales had raided.
As he’d already noticed, it contained a mixture of old source texts and modern commentaries. He helped himself to a grabbag of what seemed to be relevant histories and biographies, and beat a quick retreat.
But once back in Gassan’s office, he found himself unable to read. He was suddenly struck by the ghoulishness of what he was doing – the fact that he was sitting at a dead man’s desk, when the man wasn’t even in the ground yet.
It was as though he hadn’t really registered until then that Gassan was really dead. It had been abstract and now it was suddenly concrete: it was this room, and this desk, and this silence. From a photo in a silver frame, the professor smiled out at him, incongruously triumphant, holding up a bronze plaque. Maybe he got third prize in some archaeological bakeoff.
The more Rush looked at the picture, the more sinister the smile became.
I know something you don’t
, Gassan seemed to be saying.
All you know is what it’s like to be dead
, Rush told the picture.
And everyone gets to find that out.
From the Eurostar terminal onto the train, then to Paris, then to Rennes via Le Mans and Laval on an SNCF stopping train: it was, as Kennedy had told Ben Rush, a long haul. She’d intended to keep herself occupied by reading the abstract of Toller’s book supplied by the Avranches Scriptorial via John Partridge, but when she finally broke the file open on the tiny netbook that he’d loaned to her, it was a much slighter affair than she’d been expecting.
In the hermetically sealed tube, crossing the English Channel a hundred metres below the ocean bottom at a speed of 200 miles an hour, she read this:
The author states as his theme the end of human history and the beginning of Christ’s reign on Earth. He asserts that this is imminent, based on observations drawn from recent history.
Toller then moves to the prediction of the events that will occur as the year 1666 (referred to, he claims, in the Book of Revelations) approaches. The ‘sundry signes’ of the title are these future events, which will herald and foreshadow Christ’s return to Earth.
There was more, but it was all on the same abstract level. Predictions about things that had or (the smart money said) hadn’t happened three and a half centuries before. If you were looking for a definition of futility, you pretty much had it right there.
Once she was out of the tunnel on the French side, Kennedy checked her emails. All but one of them were from Izzy. Read in sequence, they made up a riveting saga of frustrations, humiliations and atrocities. The characters – wicked witch Caroline, pussy-whipped Simon, Hayley and Ben co-starring as the babes in the wood – were larger than life but painted with real conviction. It was better than a Christmas pantomime. Or it would have been, if the subtext hadn’t been so loud and clear:
I’m your girlfriend, get me out of here.
And she couldn’t. After what had happened at the flat the night before, she didn’t even dare to send a reply. There was no telling which parts of her life the Judas People were tracking. Izzy had almost died once already. Putting her back in the line of fire at this point was something Kennedy couldn’t bring herself to think about.
So she turned to the remaining email, which was from Ralph Prentice.
Okay, he wrote. I said I might have something for you on the knife wounds. I didn’t want to say any more than that until I’d checked it myself, because we seem to be going through a silly season. Lots of nasty incidents, but some of them less nasty than completely baffling. Who’s got time to cut the heads off a thousand rats? Where would you get the rats from in the first place?
But I digress. You remember we talked about the firebombing up in Yorkshire? It was a listed building – Nunappleton Hall. A convent, at one time, then a stately home, then empty and supposedly derelict. Empty right up to the time of the fire, in fact.
Local police are treating it as a terrorist attack, because the munitions that were used were extremely sophisticated. They called in the Met to assist with forensics, and a lot of the paperwork went across my desk – including the autopsy reports.
You might be wondering why there’d be any autopsy reports when the fire was in an abandoned building. Answer seems to be that the terrorists brought some hostages along with them and killed them on the spot. The method of execution – and I use the word advisedly – was with a knife, in each case. Severe damage to the eyes, too, possibly done with the same implement. But cause of death for all twelve was a single deeply incised wound to the throat. A very sharp knife drawn right across.
Prentice didn’t shy away from the grisly details of the post mortem examination, and hardened as she was Kennedy found the saliva drying in her mouth as she read. The victims had been gagged. Their hands and feet tied. Probably killed as they knelt, side by side, in a confined space – a stone larder behind the house’s main kitchen. Blinded and then slaughtered, most likely one at a time because some of the bodies had fallen so that limbs overlapped in ways that would be improbable if all twelve of these anonymous men and women had been killed at the same time.
They weren’t anonymous, though. All of the bodies had been identified either by DNA or by dentition. Kennedy scanned the names briefly, but they meant nothing to her, or at least, they meant far less than the terrible, indelible image of twelve people waiting in terrified, enforced silence as the butcher worked his way down the line.
She closed the email. Was this connected in some way with the theft of Toller’s book? Was there a single strand of insane logic connecting the Ryegate House break-in with this slaughter that had happened two hundred miles distant? Steal a book, then massacre a roomful of men and women? For most people, those crimes didn’t belong in the same paradigm – but for the Messengers of the Judas tribe, who’d been killing for centuries to protect the sanctity of their gospel, it could easily be possible.
A horrible suspicion came to her. She reached into her pocket again and brought out Ben Rush’s list: the names of British Library users who’d accessed Toller’s book and then vanished. She compared it to the casualties at Nunappleton Hall. Toller’s list of the disappeared was identical to Ralph Prentice’s list of the dead.
Kennedy had a strong stomach. It was her head that rebelled against this atrocity. Not kidnapping, then. It was mass murder, after all. And carried out with hideous care and precision. The Judas People, who saw their murders as sanctified rather than sinful, were loose in the world again.
No. They’d never left. She looked up Nunappleton Hall online. She wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to find that it had changed from being a convent to an estate right after the English Civil War, when one of Cromwell’s ex-generals had been looking for a place to settle down and grow roses up the door and when Johann Toller had begun preaching across England about Christ’s Second Coming.
She did one more thing. She searched for ‘rats with heads cut off’. She had had no idea what Prentice had been talking about, but the search engine showed it as a trending topic in the news and on social media. Someone had carpeted Whitehall, in London, with decapitated rats – about a thousand of them. The police were saying it was either an animal rights protest or some sick student prank. The rats had been carefully positioned in front of a building called the Banqueting House, which had been designed by Inigo Jones, some of the news reports noted, and completed in 1622.
It felt to Kennedy as though she were seeing pieces of a pattern, individual stones in a complex mosaic, but she was too close to it to see what was actually represented there. It meant something. She just had to find the vantage point from which the crazy little details coalesced into a face, a word, an answer. There was a level on which all of this made sense.