The Sixth Soul (11 page)

‘We’re holding a Kenyan national on suspicion of a serious crime.’ For a moment, a cloud crossed Frazer’s eyes. ‘That’s all I can tell you.’

‘I’m sure Father Sebastian would be happy to help you,’ said Father Frazer.

Sharp blasts of sound suddenly pumped from the phone on the desk. The ringback tone. Father Frazer looked at the instrument and the noise carried on.

‘Don’t let me stop you,’ said Rosen.

Father Frazer glanced at Rosen and the ringback tone continued. He picked up the receiver to hear the dialling tone. Two tones in, the receiver at the other end was lifted and Rosen heard,
‘Hello.’

Soft and far away, it was Brother Aidan.

‘It’s Father Luke Frazer from Archbishop’s House. I’m busy now. I shall call you later. Keep your line free.’

He replaced the receiver, a little too hard.

‘The archbishop will be back in two days. I’d be grateful if you could keep His Grace informed of any developments and, in his absence, if you could keep me abreast of any if you
involve Father Sebastian in your investigation.’

‘Of course.’

‘In the Catholic Church, Detective Rosen, we’re all members of Christ’s body on earth. What happens to one impacts on all of us, you understand?’

‘I understand. Nobody likes it when the police show up.’

‘This Kenyan—?’ asked Father Frazer.

‘I can’t say another thing about that. It’s an ongoing investigation.’

Rosen stood and shook hands with Father Frazer, feeling a film of perspiration on the man’s palm.

As he left the building, Rosen had the clearest sense that he’d just stumbled across something deeply hidden and equally nasty.

R
osen walked briskly from Archbishop’s House, back the way he had come, towards Westminster Bridge. He stopped at the pelican crossing on the
corner of Morley Street and waited for the green man to illuminate.

‘Detective Chief Inspector Rosen?’ A voice came from behind him, which Rosen recognized straight away. It was the androgynous voice at the end of the line when he had first phoned
Archbishop’s House. He turned to see a masculine-looking woman in her late fifties. He turned back to face the traffic.

‘Yes?’

‘Do you have some time to spare?’

‘Yes. You have something you’d like to share with me?’ asked Rosen.

‘Buy me a drink, and I’ll fill you in on Father Sebastian.’

——

I
N THE
D
RAGON
, a small pub near St George’s Road, Rosen bought Alice Stanley a large glass of red wine and himself a
sparkling mineral water. He sat facing her across a small rickety table.

‘How long have you worked for the diocese, Alice?’

‘Thirty years, as a secretary, receptionist, all-round dogsbody.’

Thirty years. Long enough to inspire undying loyalty or undiminished resentment.

‘Why do you want to tell me about Father Sebastian, Alice?’ probed Rosen.

‘Because Father Frazer isn’t in a position to be exactly . . . generous with the truth, and if it’s a police matter it must be serious. It’s the least I can do with the
information I have.’

In Rosen’s book, she went up four divisions in one leap.

‘Let me guess what Father Frazer told you about Flint.’ She repeated Frazer’s brief notes almost to the letter.

‘Are you ready, Detective Rosen?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Father Frazer already told you Flint was a bit of a star student. He didn’t mention the Vatican, did he? After Cambridge, Flint went to the Vatican seminary: that’s where he
was top of the class, that’s how brilliant he was. He was ordained, spent six weeks in a regular parish on what amounted to a perfunctory work experience and then went back to the Vatican. He
was twenty-six, twenty-seven years old, tipped for greatness. Then, after twelve months in the corridors of power, he puts in a request for missionary service in East Africa. A request, mind, from
the most high to the most low. It was not well-received.’ Alice sipped her wine.

‘I’d have thought that marked him down as a genuine priest,’ said Rosen.

‘Genuine but not best-serving the interests of the Church. To draw a sporting analogy, it was like a high-scoring premiership striker asking for a transfer to a pub team. Flint was under
all kinds of pressure from all kinds of people to make him withdraw his request but nothing moved him, and then there was a meeting with the Holy Father. Private, behind closed doors, one on one.
It was due to last ten minutes, but it went on for an hour and, when he came out, the Holy Father apparently said,
Permission granted, request approved.
Flint went to Kenya.’

Outside, rain ground against the windows.

‘So, Father Sebastian went to Kenya. What happened to him out there?’

‘He got lynched by a hysterical mob,’ said Alice, without emotion.

‘Pardon?’ Rosen sat up a little in his seat. ‘Why?’

‘Flint was an exorcist.’

David Rosen, a lifelong sceptic, kept his mouth firmly shut, reminding himself that the woman opposite had made her central life choices based on a faith that made little or no sense to him.

‘I know what you must be thinking,’ said Alice. ‘Demonic possession in any context adds up to mental illness by any other name.’

‘Why did he get lynched?’ asked David.

‘Flint went to Kenya, in his late twenties and in perfect health, but came back twelve months later as if he’d been smashed on death’s door. He was based in a rural district,
in the highlands of south-western Kenya, north of Lake Victoria. It began with one case, one fifteen-year-old boy from a small band of nomadic farmers. The boy started with convulsive fits, then
went into a catatonic state. His grandmother – she was the family doctor, lawyer, soothsayer – tried everything but the boy was out of it. Until . . . the sun comes up one morning. The
boy’s gone. They went looking for him. No sign. He’d upped and left in the night. One night, two nights, three nights. On the third night, the hammer fell.

‘He came back and attacked his family in their beds. The other families got it when they heard the screams and came to intervene. The boy escaped from the mob but, as he did so, he took a
machete. He came across a goatherd, a young boy. Then he came across the goats. They found what was left of the boy in twelve separate places. The news spread, and there was a panic. Sebastian was
twelve miles away. Hundreds of men gathered to hunt down the demon-possessed child. They caught up with him and, just after that, Sebastian arrived.

‘This boy, he was on a rock, surrounded, raving at the crowd, machete swinging. No one would go near him but Sebastian. He commanded the spirit out of the boy. The spirit knew Sebastian.
We’ve been waiting for you
, it said through the boy. Then it left the boy. And everything went quiet. For a few days. Then, ten miles north, another case of child possession, another
massacre.’

‘Grimly reassuring, isn’t it?’ said David Rosen.

‘What?’

‘It’s not just the developed countries that cop it when a teenager flips out.’

Rosen considered the contrast. If they’d been in Milwaukee, these ‘possessed’ children, armed with subautomatics, there’d have been a much bigger body count. They’d
have gone into the school dining room and blasted indiscriminately.
We blame TV and video games; they blame the devil
, he concluded.

He asked, ‘How come Father Sebastian ended up being lynched?’

‘He had a powerful gift. Devils recognized him, just as they recognized Christ in the Gospels. They were scared of him. He cast out ten devils in three months, and each time the spirit was
different, stronger. How did he end up getting lynched? The tenth devil took up residence in Sebastian, the tenth devil was the devil, Satan himself, according to the Kenyan first-hand
accounts.’

‘Are you saying—’ Rosen chose his words as carefully as if he’d been picking nettles with his bare hands. ‘Are you saying that Father Sebastian followed the pattern
of those other murderous, possessed men and women, and actually massacred people under the influence of an evil spirit?’

‘The story goes cold there. He was attacked by the mob, subjected to a brutal beating and left for dead. I can see your scepticism, Detective Rosen, it’s written all over your
face.’

‘No, Alice, I believe you. I believe the surface of this history. I just don’t know how Sebastian Flint could survive that.’

She pulled out a placebo cigarette from her handbag and sucked hard on it. There was a lengthy silence.

‘So, he survived the lynch mob. What happened next?’ Rosen encouraged her to go on.

‘He was found three days later by a safari bus and was taken to the nearest medical centre. When his identity became clear, he was collected by a local diocesan representative.’ She
paused. ‘I need to pay a visit,’ said Alice, standing. ‘Stay there.’ She wandered off to the ladies.

From a dirt road in Kenya to a monastery in Kent? It was the stuff of legends and Rosen hoped it wasn’t true. He spiralled quickly through a grim chain of thought. If it
was
true
and Father Sebastian had acted like all the other demon-possessed people he had exorcised, that made him a mass murderer. And if that was the case, he should be extradited back to Kenya and the
Kenyan police needed to reopen some cold cases.

Rosen ran through the logic of the detail in Alice’s story. How could a man at death’s door survive the heat of the African day and the cold of the tropical night with no water or
shelter?

The wind pummelled the darkened windows. Alice returned and sat down.

‘If they find out I’ve told you all this, I could lose my job,’ she said.

‘They’ll never know.’

‘Anyway, he’s tucked away in St Mark’s now, safe and sound.’

‘I know,’ said Rosen. ‘I’ve been to see him.’

‘Really?’ She sounded amazed.

‘When I went there, I showed him my laptop because they don’t have computers at St Mark’s. I Googled his name. There was very little about him. There were brief replicated
accounts of him dying in a road traffic accident in Kenya, but there was absolutely nothing about the story you’ve told me, Alice.’

‘I’m only telling you what I heard at the time, in the nineties.’

‘I’m not doubting you,’ said Rosen. ‘It’s just . . . How is it that he’s been reported as having died in a road traffic accident? The internet thrives on
events such as you’ve recounted: devils, possession, murder, lynch mobs, miraculous survival . . . Yet there’s nothing on the net.’

‘This happened during the infancy of the internet and it happened a long way from here.’ She paused, waiting for Rosen to speak. Easily irritated by half-baked speculation about
police corruption and manipulation of the truth, he remained silent about his conclusions on the behaviour of the Roman Catholic Church.

‘What do you think happened, David?’ asked Alice.

‘From what you’re saying,’ – Rosen spoke as if he found it hard to believe the words coming from his mouth – ‘the Catholic Church got Father Sebastian out of
Kenya as quickly as possible.’

Alice nodded. ‘And?’

‘And stories about his death in an RTA were manufactured and posted on the internet during the early days of the World Wide Web to kill off the version you’ve told me.’

‘That’s about the top and bottom of it. We’ve covered up tens of thousands of child abuse cases, why not this?’

Why not a handful of dead Africans?
thought Rosen. Especially as Flint had received summary justice from the mob. Especially as he had gone to Kenya with the pope’s blessing.

‘Is there anything else?’ he asked.

Alice shook her head. ‘No. Nothing else to add.’

Rosen thanked her sincerely and reassured her that he would protect her as a source of information.

He stood up. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing else?’

‘Yes. I’ll have another large glass of red wine before you leave. And will you be seeing Father Sebastian again?’

‘Almost certainly.’

‘Then be very, very careful. You don’t know what you’re dealing with. No one does.’

T
he idea for the hoist came from a TV medical documentary that Herod had taped and watched whenever he needed a distraction. He’d had the
tape for years and, although he wasn’t keeping count, he knew he must have watched it from beginning to end at least two hundred times.

‘Saving Dannie’ detailed a day in the life of Laura Ashe, a single mother from Glasgow, and her daughter Dannie, a paraplegic eight-year-old with profound and multiple learning
difficulties. Dannie, whose range of independent abilities extended to blinking, swallowing, filling her nappy and – sometimes – smiling at the sound of her mother’s voice when
she sang, made Herod feel better.

To bath Dannie, Laura used a Faboorgliften hoist, a merciful wonder of Norwegian engineering. The Faboorgliften was strong and sturdy. It was a gift for carers too old, too young or too ill to
handle heavy equipment and the heavier bodies that the hoist made manageable.

The documentary was tastefully filmed with no specific nudity. The Faboorgliften hoist acted much like a claw in an amusement arcade ‘Grab-a-Gift’ game. When the arm of the hoist
descended, Laura fitted the sling, which was hooked to the arm by four clips, beneath Dannie’s body. With the aid of the hoist, Dannie could be lifted by her sciatic mother from wheelchair to
bath to mobile bed.

When the will of Satan was made known to him, his first step on the path of faith was to order a Faboorgliften hoist, just like the one used by Dannie’s self-deprecating mother.

Long distance and direct to Faboorg Medical Suppliers in Oslo, he gave his Mastercard number and was asked, for the purposes of market research, ‘Is the sling for an elderly relative? Your
mother, maybe?’

Now, he wheeled the hoist alongside the flotation tank and flicked open the locks on the side of the lid, wondering if the vibration caused would alert the carrier inside the tank.

On the sling, he’d placed a hypodermic needle, its chamber filled with Pentothal, an insurance policy against futile but tiresome resistance.