The Deceit (26 page)

‘We need a damn
hospital
, Albert.’

His shrug was eloquent. ‘You know that is not a choice. They will have seen the blood – they will be well aware one of us is wounded. Every hospital and doctor for miles will be monitored.’ He sighed, and detached himself, and walked up the hill. ‘Come, my friends, let us throw ourselves at the mercy of St Didymus the Blind. It is only one or two miles – we must be mountaineers.’

It was only one or two miles of
hell
. First, up the hill, out of the side-valley, an ascent of pure pain; then, down a rubbly road, carrying an almost comatose Helen, who was seeping blood all the while. Halfway there, Albert took Helen’s other arm, slung it over his neck, and together the two men helped her along, unspeaking and grim, until they reached a tiny crop of buildings, silent under the Pleiades.

‘I will speak with the abbot.’

Hanna disappeared. Ryan leaned against a rock. Helen murmured, ‘
Warum … Wo ist
…’ Then she fell into a feverish sleep.

They had arrived at the humblest of Coptic villages, just a tiny group of adobe houses surrounding a mud-brick monastery, lost in the starlit Theban desert. Albert was right: they were in the epicentre of nowhere. This was a good place to hide out, if Helen could survive without proper medical care.

Hushed and worried voices disturbed the stillness. A trio of nuns emerged, in black habits, accompanied by Albert, hurrying from the wooden gate of the monastery, St Tawdros. The nuns approached Ryan with compassionate smiles, then they took Helen in their arms. One of them had a flashlight, which she shone on Helen’s face, then on her bleeding wound.

This nun shook her head, and gazed at Ryan. Her Arabic was soft. ‘I fear we are too late, I am sorry.’

The Incident Room at New Scotland Yard was deserted. Apart from Chief Superintendent David Boyle and Karen Trevithick.

CS Boyle had guided Karen through her career and was certainly something of a father figure to her; Karen had lost her dad quite young. So she didn’t remotely mind when he put an arm around her shoulder. And he didn’t mind when she shed two or three quiet tears. Again.

Throughout the day she had been sneaking off to do her crying – like Curtis taking cigarette breaks. Now the working day was over she could cry in the office.

Luke will rape you. Luke will smell your fear
.

Grabbing a tissue from a box on the desk, she wiped and dabbed, angry at herself for giving in once more to emotion. She might be a mother with a disappeared child, that child might even have been kidnapped by a murderer,
but she was also a police officer, a Detective Chief Inspector.
She could solve this.

But how? For the first time in her life the mysteries overwhelmed her. Maybe she should take CS Boyle’s offer and remove herself from the case?

The idea was absurd. Wiping away the last tear, she said, ‘We’ve got nowhere, have we?’

Boyle crossed to the whiteboard. He was nearly fifty, more grey than not, and she trusted him implicitly in almost every way; she trusted him to give her the unsugared truth.

‘No, we haven’t. It’s bizarre, frankly. Let’s try it one more time.’

Picking up a marker-pen, he wrote the word
ENTRY
at the top, followed by a big, flourishing question mark. ‘If Rothley is responsible, how did he get into your flat? Your cousin Alan wouldn’t have opened the door to a stranger, would he?’

‘No.’

Boyle nodded, and lifted the pen. The buttons on his uniform, unusually, needed polishing. He was recently divorced. Karen idly wondered if the two things were connected. She was doing a lot of idle wondering today, anything to keep her mind off the girl buried alive under the floorboards.
Would that happen to Eleanor? What could this guy do to her? Put her in a coffin and …

To her great relief, Boyle interrupted her meditations. ‘So he didn’t break in, and your cousin Alan wouldn’t let him in, and yet he was in there, judging by the little birds.’

‘That’s about it. Yes.’

‘Doesn’t add up, Karen, just
doesn’t add up
.’ Boyle vigorously crossed out the word
ENTRY
.

Now he wrote underneath it,
KIDNAP
.

‘Very well. Let’s move on. Let’s say he got in somehow. Now what? He’s in the flat, and he is intending to – we presume …’ Boyle’s eyes were full of pity, but determination, too. ‘His intention is to kidnap Alan and your daughter Eleanor.’

Karen resisted the urge to speak. In case she wailed.

‘Yet we have no signs of struggle in your house. No upturned furniture, no evidence of resistance, no noises reported by the neighbours. Alan is, as I understand it, hardly the sort of guy to just give up and calmly let a stranger take him, and his niece.’

‘No.’

‘Therefore?’

‘Rothley had a weapon.’

Boyle nodded. ‘Either a gun, or a big knife at least. Probably a gun. Or Alan would have fought. He plays rugby, right? But there is a further mystery here.’ Boyle put brackets around the word
KIDNAP
, and then a big question mark after it.

‘We have not even the slightest trace evidence of Rothley being
in
your flat: no prints, no footprints, nil. Apart from, as I say, the birds.’

Karen gazed at the whiteboard, eyes blurred. In her mind she could see Eleanor running into her arms, she could smell her daughter’s hair, see the toys she played with in the bath. She could taste the soup she made and they shared; she could see Eleanor laughing and jumping on the bed, seeing how high she could jump, with the twins.

The sobs came suddenly and this time were staggering in their ferocity. Doubling her over like a punch to the stomach, knocking the wind out of her. This was something new: it was the reality that gripped her, the terrible reality that this evening when she went home,
Eleanor wouldn’t be there.
The flat would be silent. The little bedroom unoccupied. Karen would sit there alone in her living room, staring at a switched-off TV
.

‘I’m sorry,’ Karen said, plucking uselessly at a tissue, as if paper could staunch her grief. ‘I’m sorry.’

David Boyle came over and gave Karen another fatherly pat on the back.

Karen wished, right now, that she had a husband. She desperately wished she had a husband. She
should
have married. It was all her fault. If she’d married the father like a normal woman, none of this would have happened: but she’d had a fling, and she’d known it was a fling, and it was
her
idea not to use anything because she
wanted
a baby, but she didn’t want a husband, and the guy was sweet and funny and smart and Australian. It was all perfect, if you wanted to be a single mother: the father existed and he was nice but he was elsewhere. That meant she could be Karen Trevithick, she could keep her name, and her career, but also have a baby, and be a mother, and yet remain independent: she could have it all. And now, because she had wanted it all, because she had refused to get married, she had lost
everything.

Karen was so deep into despair and self-loathing and guilt she didn’t realize Boyle was talking, but when she came back to herself, he was writing on the whiteboard again.

SUSPECT
.

‘What do we know about Rothley?’ Boyle put a question mark next to the word.

SUSPECT?

‘Not much,’ Karen mumbled.

CS Boyle nodded. ‘That’s putting it mildly. Again, there is a striking lack of evidence. We know he was in Israel, then he apparently turns up in England, but we don’t know how or why. He has money, but we don’t know how or where he got it. He got a group of people to burn a truckload of cats. Where? How? Why?’ Boyle was pacing now, back and forth. ‘One of his accomplices kills himself. We don’t know why, or who he is. He kills a young woman in Chancery Lane. We don’t know how, or who she is. She even
bites off her own fingers
, and we don’t know why: if he somehow persuaded her to do it, or what. Again, with no struggle at all. We know nothing. We don’t even know how and why he got your address. It’s absurd.’

‘Not quite nothing,’ Karen said. ‘We have tracked down one of Alicia Rothley’s friends, who said Alicia was acting very strangely in the last few months. Going off on her own, seeing someone unknown.’

‘Presumably her brother, yes. Preparing the ritual, the month in Cornwall.’

‘The magical stuff. We also know Rothley was apparently re-enacting everything Crowley did.’

Not quite everything
, came the voice in Karen’s mind.
He is trying to complete the magic by doing the one thing Crowley didn’t: sacrifice a child.

The sob choked in her throat. Boyle gazed at the whiteboard, apparently thinking along the same lines, but unable to articulate it. ‘If he has … ah …’ He coughed. ‘We … we know he is trying to do this Crowley magic – this could be our way in.’

Boyle wrote the word
CROWLEY
on the whiteboard, and drew a large circle around it. The pen squealed against the board in the empty evening silence of the office.

‘Crowley is our way in. We need to go back to the internet. Rothley must have recruited on the internet.’

‘But there are dozens of sites dedicated to Crowley, and his world. The occult, Thelema, sex-magic, Crowleyana. All that.’

Boyle shook his head. ‘So we check them all. I know your team have gone through this, but we need to go through it
again.
’

CS Boyle gazed past her shoulder, as if seeing the solution written on the wall behind, among the photos of the dead girl in Chancery Lane, the gashed face of the suicide in Cornwall.

‘We’re missing something. Tomorrow morning, hell, tonight maybe, we get the best bloody expert on this Crowley lunatic in here, and we give him seventeen coffees, and we threaten him with a brick over his head, and we find the forums or sites where Rothley
must
have got his disciples. We will find it, Karen. We will find this bastard.’ Boyle walked to the coffee machine and poured two cups of overstewed coffee. ‘You know, if I was an idiot I’d say there is something, rather … well, haunting about this. The way Rothley
magics
himself into the flat, and
spirits
your daughter off. The way he appears and disappears. It’s
unworldly.
But I don’t believe in spells and witches. He has some shtick. Let’s pin it down.’ He handed one coffee to Karen, then sipped his own, wincing at the heat of the drink. ‘That said, we know that
he
believes in this ludicrous magic. The Abra …’

‘Abra-Melin ritual.’

‘Yes. And it’s complex, yes? Challenging and very complex?’

‘Apparently.’

‘So. If he is preparing some ghastly ritual, Karen, with … uh, with your daughter, it is going to take him time, it must take him time, which means we have time, we have time to find Eleanor.’

For maybe two minutes Karen felt a sliver of optimism, but once Boyle had left the office and she was alone in the room, the shuddering fear and guilt came dancing back in, mocking her.

Atha atha atharim.

Karen needed to get out. She was staying with Julie tonight, but she had to go back to her flat first. But there was no way she was lingering in that flat, not without Eleanor. And, moreover, she and Julie shared this misery:
Julie’s husband was also missing.

Out on the cold London streets a few infant flakes of snow were falling. Eleanor loved snow.

Karen made for the bustle of the Tube and the last of the rush hour; she wanted the crowds and the crush, she wanted to be just a normal person on a Northern Line train, reading a paper, nodding to sleep, chatting with a friend. Not a mother with a stolen child.

But on the Tube, people looked at her. At her red eyes. Could they tell? Karen exited the Tube at East Finchley with a small sense of relief and began the freezing walk home. As she did, her mobile shivered in her pocket. A message. Voicemail.

Her hopes leapt. A breakthrough? They’d found the house? They’d found Rothley? She clamped the phone to her ear. The voice was unmistakeable and it sent a spear of polluted ice into her heart.

‘
Mummy Mummy Mummy he is going to hurt me Mummy Mummy he is he is I’m scared Mummy Mummy please he is he is hurting me Mummy!’

The voice of her daughter ended there. Abruptly. How had he silenced her? Then, in the background, she heard a man’s voice. Like a serene growling. An arrogant incantation.

‘
Ananias, Azarias, Lazarius
.’

Then Eleanor screamed, and the voicemail ended.

Karen fell to her knees, then crumpled to the freezing pavement, quite broken. Snowflakes dissolved on her face, and in her mouth; she could taste their sad and silvery melting.

The little girl was sobbing.

‘Don’t cry,’ said Rothley, leaning close. She was squashed in her wooden box, looking up at him. ‘Why cry? Really. There’s no point. Do you want to speak to your mother again?’

She nodded.

‘OK. Here.’ He held the phone close. The girl looked up at him, trusting, sweetly, desperately waiting for permission. Rothley held the phone to her ear and the girl listened to her mother’s voice, and she sobbed and wailed into the mobile, entirely incoherent. Rothley waited for her to finish her futile lament. Then he killed the call and said, ‘Good. Now, I hope you understand, I am going to do something to you, soon.’

‘Yemm.’

‘It is going to be very painful, and you will see horrible things.’

‘No yem.’

‘Yes. Say
yes
. It is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.’ Rothley smiled. The winter cold was piercing but they were all warm in here, in this sweet little chamber, that he had taken so long to prepare. All the months, all the years of training and dedication: from Buddhism to Zionism to veganism to Scientism to the final revelation – this. Here. This was it.

A faint smell of ammonia hung in the air. The little girl had voided her bladder with fear. Again. Rothley sighed. She also looked fairly ludicrous, roped and tied and kept in the box. But it didn’t matter. The time had arrived for him to do the ritual, the very last of the Abra-Melin rite. Then the demons would come and the final revelation would be his. The ancient truth of the dark, dark magic, the Akhmimic magic.