Crucified (8 page)

THE NEXT DAY

Clickety-clack . . .

Clickety-clack . . .

The pope and Wyatt Rook die on the same day and end up before St. Peter at the pearly gates. The keeper of the keys to heaven asks each man for his name and looks him up in a book.

After passing out wings, halos, and harps, St. Peter says, "If you'll both come with me, I'll show you to your dwellings."

The three walk along the clouds until they come to an insignificant cottage. "Here's where you'll stay for the rest of eternity," St. Peter tells the pope.

From there, he leads Wyatt to his abode—a palatial mansion with a private swimming pool, a celestial garden, and a terrace overlooking the pearly gates.

"Enjoy your stay," St. Peter says, turning to go.

Taken aback, Wyatt blurts out, "There must be some mistake. You put the pope in a shack, and you put me here."

"No mistake," St. Peter says, shaking his head. "We have most of the two hundred or so popes in heaven. They're commonplace. But you . . . well, we've never had a lawyer."

Clickety-clack . . .

Clickety-clack . . .

Fat chance, Wyatt thought.

When he showed up at the pearly gates—assuming the Bible was right about the afterlife—he would probably be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and the seat of his pants by St. Peter's heavenly bouncer and given the bum's rush down to hell to join the other broiling lawyers. So many sins had Wyatt committed in his hedonistic life that he had begun to hope there really was nothing more. If not, he was damned.

Wyatt Rook is sitting in his loft one night when there is a sudden flash of light and smoke swirls out of the floor. The Devil steps from the twister to address the lawyer: "I understand you'll give anything to succeed in life. So I've come here to make you an offer. You'll expose every secret you go after, your books will all be bestsellers, and your documentaries will all win Oscars. In return, I'll take the souls of you, your parents, your grandparents, your wife, your children, and all your friends."

Wyatt thinks about it.

"So what's the catch?" he asks.

Clickety-clack . . .

Clickety-clack . . .

That's more likely, he thought.

However . . .

Had he been trundling north to York on this train
before
the book-signing at the Unknown Soldier, he'd almost certainly have been fantasizing about Val. "Thou shalt not covet thy best friend's wife," the Ten Commandments warn, so that would have been more for St. Peter to add to the hellish side of his scales. Yet here he was thinking about Liz Hannah and her wayward buttons instead, so perhaps even this sinner could be redeemed.

Unless, of course, his naughty thoughts were another sin.

A poor hand of poker.

He should have held out for her bra.

Wyatt didn't have the time to make this trip. He was in Britain to sell his books and flog his documentaries. Still, if there was a chance that Mick Balsdon held the key to solving the Judas puzzle, then Wyatt couldn't afford
not
to make this trip. But what had really convinced him was the thought of Liz's grandmother dying without knowing the fate of her husband. Wyatt's life was ruled by his need to learn what had happened to his parents, so he knew that walking away from the possibility of giving her mental peace was a sin that would haunt him for the rest of his life—and drop the hellish side of St. Peter's scales down with a
thunk.

Clickety-clack . . .

Clickety-clack . . .

The train pulled into the station.

How could a historian not love York? Halfway up the British Isles between London and Edinburgh, this city was founded in 71 A.D. as Eboracum—"place of yew trees"—during the conquest of the north by Rome's Ninth Legion. Beside York Minster, where his troops proclaimed him emperor, stands a huge statue of Constantine the Great, Rome's first Christian leader. Then came the Vikings, in 866, and almost a century of the Kingdom of Jorvik. And no sooner had Eric Bloodaxe been expelled than the Norman Conquest came charging up. The Middle Ages brought reconstruction of York's walls, including Micklegate Bar, beside the train station. Traditionally, monarchs entered the city by way of that towering gate, and since 1389, they had touched the state sword on coming in. High up on its outer wall were hooks where the heads of traitors were left to rot.

Traitors like Henry "Hotspur" Percy, in 1403, and the Earl of Northumberland, in 1572. This was the home of Guy Fawkes, the Roman Catholic who tried to blow up Parliament with the Gunpowder Plot. And York was where the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin had danced on the end of a rope.

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
 

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

I see no reason why Gunpowder 

Treason
Should ever be forgot.

A penny loaf to feed the Pope.

A farthing o' cheese to choke him.

A pint of beer to rinse it down.

A faggot of sticks to burn him.

Bum him in a tub of tar.

Burn him like a blazing star.

Burn his body from his head.

Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.

Ah yes, York.

Had Wyatt had time for a walk, he'd have crossed the River Ouse to amble through the Shambles. That street was like a time machine back to the Elizabethan era. The buildings leaned over the cobblestones until their roofs almost touched in the middle, and in places you could stretch your hands and brush the houses on both sides. The name came from
Fleshammels—
a Saxon word meaning "flesh shelves"—because butchers displayed meat for sale on the wide windowsills. Since livestock was slaughtered outside on the street, the pavement sloped to a channel where blood, guts, and offal were flushed away. The pandemonium and mess coined another term: a shambles.

In 1571, Margaret Clitherow married a butcher with a shop in the Shambles. She permitted her house to be used for Mass by Catholic priests, a capital crime in Elizabethan times, and so was executed at the tollbooth on the Ouse Bridge. Made to lie on her back with a sharp stone under her spine, she was stretched out in the form of a cross with her hands tied to posts.

Then a door was placed on her and weighted down until she was crushed to death. In 1970, Pope Paul VI made her a saint, and her home in the Shambles is now a shrine.

But enough of blood and carnage; Wyatt was here to work.

So the American rented a car and drove out of York, forsaking the wicked ways of the city for the countryside.

Out here, between the brooding moors to the northeast and the Pennine Hills to the west, lay the neglected airfields of Bomber Command. Today, most were little more than crumbling runways with rusty hangars that had long since lost the battle to weeds and grass. But in his imagination, Wyatt saw a time when the rumbling sky beckoned the warriors of the night, and the surrounding villages—a pub or two, an old Anglican church, and a hotel that served meals for the restricted price of five shillings—bustled with men who would never have meshed but for the anvil of war. The tough and the brainy, the pious and the heathen were all forged into seven-man groups that fought their lonely way across the dark landscape of Hitler's Reich and—hopefully—back home.

Wyatt wondered why Balsdon, who still lived here, couldn't leave it behind.

The Judas puzzle?

Mist and drizzle mixed to make the first half of the drive a somber journey. The windshield wipers flicked arches so Wyatt could follow the road through this broad expanse of rolling farmland dotted with ruined abbeys and castles. The legions of Rome had marched the route his tires were treading, and somewhere out there stood three monoliths called the Devil's Arrows.

Dragged ten miles and raised for an unfathomable reason by pre-historic man, these standing stones were supposed to have come from a barrage shot by the Devil at local churches.

With weather like this, it's no wonder the local Bronte sisters dreamed up
Wuthering Heights
and
Jane Eyre,
and no wonder Captain Cook sailed off to the sunny South Seas. But as Wyatt neared Mick Balsdon's village, a break in the cloud cover let the sun shine through, and an iridescent rainbow arced over his destination. Just as all roads once led to Rome, these drystone walls converged on the tiny community at the center of their web. And on the outskirts of the snug stone village—basically, a cricket pitch doubling as a common, backed by an alehouse called the Cricketer's Arms—Wyatt located the lane that branched off to Balsdon's cottage, down near the old mill stream.

"Mill Cottage," read the sign at the top of a footpath descending through dripping trees.

Beside the sign stood a market cross from the plague years of the 1660s. The depression at its base used to be filled with vinegar, and customers would wash their coins in hopes that would save the miller from the Black Death.

"Kaah-kaah-kaah."

From somewhere above him in the limbs of the trees, Wyatt heard the cawing of his namesake (though he preferred to think he was named for the chess piece). Folklore holds that a rook can sense the nearness of death, and Wyatt could picture this scene in an Agatha Christie novel. He was Miss Marple in St. Mary Mead, off to see Colonel Mustard about the church raffle, unaware that the old boy had been done to death in the old mill cottage by a bonk on the noggin from a shepherd's crook. Wyatt imagined the bridge across the stream had a story, too. A local suitor would swim across to woo the miller's daughter, but her father refused to allow her to marry a ne'er-do-well. So the lad shipped off to the colonies to make his fortune in ivory tusks, and when he came back to marry the lass with the miller's blessing, he built the bridge across the water as a testimonial to undying love.

No wonder he was a writer.

It was in that overblown frame of mind that Wyatt knocked on the door.

The cottage was fashioned from dark gray millstone grit and had a red tiled roof. Ivy climbed the walls around the mullioned windows. Liz had phoned Balsdon yesterday to ask if Wyatt could see him last night or this morning, depending on how soon he could get free from his promo tour. The sergeant had replied that any time was fine by him. Confined to a wheelchair, he was going nowhere, and his wartime archive on the 
Ace of Clubs
was spread across the table, waiting for all to see.

So why didn't Balsdon answer?

Wyatt knocked again.

Louder.

And still no response.

Balsdon, Liz had informed him, lived alone. A housekeeper came by twice a week to bring him groceries and clean up.

The elderly warrior was a fiercely independent man, and he had no intention of going quietly to his grave. No retirement home for him, he'd see out his life in solitude, with a link to the Internet to help him ferret out the secret behind the Judas puzzle.

Now, Wyatt wondered if his time had run out.

Had Balsdon died of old age in his cottage?

Or was he singing in the shower and couldn't hear the knock?

Wyatt tried the latch.

The door was unlocked.

Opening it a crack, he called out, "Sergeant Balsdon? May I come in? It's Wyatt Rook."

Nothing.

Then he saw it.

Blood streamed across the hardwood floor from around the corner to the left of the entrance hall. The hall was no more than a vestibule for shedding coats and footwear. Thinking that Balsdon had fallen and struck his head, Wyatt rushed to his aid—and found himself confronted by a murder scene far grislier than any in Agatha Christ
ie.

Blood and carnage.

The room was dominated by a huge fireplace. The vaulted ceiling was spanned by heavy beams dangling farmland relics: sheep shears, a butter stamp, a pig-feeder, a bird-scarer, a flat iron, love spoons, and such. Naked, the old airman was slung by his hands and feet from one of the beams. He resembled a safari beast being carried on a pole. To muffle his screams, the killer had clad the suspended man in the leather flying helmet and oxygen mask of Bomber Command. The oxygen tube hanging from the poor guy's face made him look like a skinny elephant.

A digital recorder at the end of the tube would have captured a permanent transcript of anything he confessed.

The ropes around his hands and feet were looped over the beam so Balsdon could be hoisted and lowered as slowly as the killer holding the makeshift pulleys desired.

Grease and gravity.

What an ugly way to d
ie.

The wheelchair, flung aside, lay overturned in the corner.

Beneath Balsdon's buttocks, another device took its place—a sturdy wooden stool with a metal triangle bolted on top. The pyramid-shaped chair, glistening with lubricant, had blood streaking down its legs from the pointed seat. Positioned so it aimed at Balsdon's anus, the thick spike had impaled its way through his abdomen, pushing his intestines out of their cavity as it jutted from his belly. His bowels hung down from the Judas chair like the elephant trunk from the face mask. Above the horror, from the hook of a discarded farm utensil, hung an upside-down Catholic crucifix.

Shocked, Wyatt reached for his cellphone to call the police.

+ + +

Detective Inspector Ramsey, of Yorkshire CID, was a beefy man with a nose pushed off to one side, as if he'd run into a hay-maker in the pub on Saturday night.

"So you don't know the victim?"

"No," Wyatt replied.

"Never met him?"

"No."

"Then why come here to see him?"

"To look at his archive."

"What archive?"

"One that focused on a bomber called the
Ace of Clubs.

He told a friend of mine that it was spread out on the table."

"The table's bare."

"It must have been stolen."

"Why?"

"For what's in it. Balsdon linked the bomber to a Nazi traitor who was never unmasked."

"Judas?"

"Yes."

Ramsey nodded. "I read the recent interview. So what does the victim's theory have to do with you?"