The Sixth Soul (6 page)

The work was monotonous, the stuff of dead ends, not of dreams. And, each year, he was thrust into the company of the same migrant families, a protracted reminder of the hand-to-mouth world he
longed to escape.

Aged thirteen, he knew for a fact that football and music were never going to be his way out. Hard, meaningful work with a solid education were the key to a better life. But, each year, in
September and October, he missed the first half-term of school, and from November through to the following July he felt he never quite caught up.

The weather had improved a little and the sun coaxed a dreamy mist over the flatlands. St Mark’s was a turn in the road away. Rosen switched on the radio, Classic FM. Vaughan
Williams’s take on ‘Greensleeves’
.
He turned it off and stopped the car at the mouth of the entrance of St Mark’s, invaded by the strangest urge.
Turn round, go
home, resign from the case, give in to Baxter and straighten paper clips until you retire or die, whichever comes first
.

He drove down the lane and parked at the front entrance of the monastery. There was no one there to greet him and, as he got out of his car, he imagined for a moment he was in some place
deserted by all humankind.

He thought he could smell hops but it was the wrong time of year. Then, he heard a voice.

‘Can I help you?’ It belonged to a fat, bald man, sweating through exertion. He wiped his fingers on his dungarees and extended a wet hand that was still caked in dirt. Rosen
recognized the voice from his answering machine.

‘Brother Aidan?’

‘Yes?’ The monk sounded mildly surprised to be identified. ‘Who are you?’

‘You left a message on my answering machine. I’m DCI David Rosen from the Met.’ Rosen showed his warrant card and Brother Aidan took a half-step backwards.

Mild surprise gave way to something more uneasy. ‘You didn’t reply,’ Aidan answered, defensively. Grey stubble dotted his face and scalp, and there was something rubbery about
his features that made Rosen think of a cheap Hallowe’en disguise.

‘I did. What were you doing at nine o’clock last night?’

‘We were in evening prayer.’

‘That’s when I called you back, Brother Aidan.’

‘But who answered?’

‘Father Sebastian. I’ve travelled from London to meet him.’

‘Well, I—’

Aidan looked as if he was casting around in his mind for excuses, as if the suddenness of Rosen’s arrival made the meeting somehow a non-starter.

The prospect of yet another disappointment overtook Rosen.

‘We arranged it last night as you were praying.’

‘Yeah, yes, I’m sure you did. I’ll take you to him.’

——

W
HEN
R
OSEN FOLLOWED
Aidan across the threshold of St Mark’s, he felt the urge to remove his shoes and was glad he’d forgotten his mobile
phone, leaving it in the car.

‘There are seven men permanently here, including myself and Father Sebastian,’ Aidan replied to a question Rosen hadn’t posed.

Above the staircase, a Victorian oil painting of St Dominic, unsmiling and solitary, cast his eyes on Rosen as he made his way up to the upstairs landing and a dark windowless corridor.

‘I was surprised by his asking me to call you.’ Aidan smiled but didn’t look happy. ‘You should listen to him closely. He’s – the word
blessed
seems
inappropriate. He’s insightful.’

Aidan stopped at a door with the number eleven painted onto its dark surface. There was a single scratch mark that cut through the white digits, along with a network of cracks, and made Rosen
think of a DNA helix.

‘There are more rooms than men,’ said Aidan, tapping on the door, nervously it seemed to Rosen. Silence. He knocked again, a little more firmly and said, ‘Father Sebastian? You
have a visitor. Father, are you there?’

In the space of a breath, Rosen recollected the grey acres of his childhood. The central image was of a thin man, his own absent father, with a few possessions stuffed into two carrier bags,
walking away from the front door of the flat, along the landing of the tenement block, never looking back as he turned onto the staircase, never to be seen again.

‘He mightn’t be in his room.’ Aidan banged on the door with the palm of his hand. ‘He has hearing difficulties. After Kenya.’

Slowly, Aidan turned the handle and pushed the door open. Inside the room, a match was struck on a coarse surface, its red tip flaring. The door opened wider.

His back turned to the opening door, Father Sebastian was lighting an incense stick. A sliver of smoke rose from its tip. He killed the match with dampened finger and thumb.

It was a small room, with a single bed, one closed window, a small row of books, and a porcelain sink with a mirror above in which Rosen glimpsed Father Sebastian’s face. His eyes were
blue, his face ageing but model handsome, his hair black and slick with sweat or water. Their eyes connected in the glass.

‘It’s an upside-down and back-to-front world,’ said the priest, smiling and turning. ‘Chief Inspector David Rosen?’

‘Father Sebastian.’

‘Thank you for coming to see me. Would you like to – please, come in.’

Sebastian turned back to the sink, ran hot water over a white flannel and placed the plug in the plughole. His white T-shirt was grey with age and clung to his back with a circle of sweat. There
was a hole in the side, the size of a fifty-pence piece, just above the hip where the elasticized band of his shapeless jogging bottoms hugged his narrow waist.
Lean and poor
, thought
Rosen,
poor and lean
.

Rosen moved into the room, the smell of incense rising above the salt of the priest’s body and the fading sulphur of the match.

‘Aidan, thank you so much for calling Detective Rosen.’

‘You spoke with him yourself, last night.’

‘A ringing phone in an empty room. In the silence of the evening, the sound could have pierced the walls and disturbed your prayers. I picked up and spoke to Detective Rosen.
Serendipity.’

He dipped his head and wiped his face with the flannel.

So why weren’t you praying with them?
, thought Rosen, but asked, ‘You a keen runner, Father?’

‘Just a couple of hours each morning.’

‘Would you like some tea, Detective Rosen?’ asked Aidan. ‘Coffee, perhaps?’

‘Aidan, we’ll join you in the kitchen, in a few minutes,’ said the priest, and Rosen wondered who the most senior member of the community was.

‘No problem, Sebastian.’

Aidan closed the door and walked away with brisk footsteps; the sounds of someone keen to be elsewhere.

There were deep white marks, fierce lines on the priest’s skin, scar tissue, showing through the wet patch on his T-shirt. Rosen ran his eyes up and down his muscular arms. Nothing. Only
unmatching sweatbands, oddly old-fashioned, around each wrist, and on his feet trainers that didn’t belong to the same pair.

‘I hope you don’t mind the holy smoke. It’s a small room and it becomes unpleasant if I don’t. Someone, some clever soul, painted over the woodwork on the window and
it’s stuck, it won’t open.’

Sebastian dried his face on a hand towel and sat down on the bed.

‘I haven’t got a chair.’

The bed was the only alternative then, to standing awkwardly and trying not to stare down at the priest’s face.

Rosen sat on the bed. On the floor, at his feet, face down, lay a sheet of glossy paper, A4, with blu-tak in each corner. A picture for the bare walls? There were blu-tak marks on the wall
between the bed and the sink, and the discolorations made Rosen think of the remains of the old lady at 24 Brantwood Road; chemical stains left behind by a neglected life.

‘You look pensive, Detective.’ Rosen felt pensive. ‘Mind if I call you David?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Did your mother name you after the great Hebrew king?’

‘I come from a long line of secular Jews, Father. But I am married to a Catholic.’

He appeared not to hear.

‘You didn’t do Hebrew at your school?’

‘We didn’t do a great deal of English at my school, Father.’

‘I’m younger than you, David. Drop the “Father”, and call me Sebastian, if you like.’

‘You said you had some information.’

‘What a world we live in.’

Rosen gave him time, but he said nothing further for what soon felt like too long. Monastic time and real time collided in Rosen’s head and his patience frayed. He pulled a dictaphone from
his pocket.

‘Mind if I record this chat of ours?’

Nothing. Not a flicker.

Rosen pressed ‘record’.

‘Date, fourteenth of March. Time of interview, eight-fifteen. DCI David Rosen interviewing Father Sebastian, in his room, room number eleven, at St Mark’s Monastery, near Faversham
in Kent. No other witnesses present.’

Amusement danced in the priest’s eyes.

‘Would you please state your name? For the tape.’

‘Father Sebastian.’

‘Father, you told me on the telephone last night that you knew the motive for the killings of four women and the abduction of Julia Caton. Is that correct?’

‘That is correct.’

‘You also told me how the killer gained access to the home of his fifth victim.’ Flint nodded at Rosen’s words. ‘That detail is known only to the police and to the
killer. Given that knowledge, and your claim to knowing the motive for the abduction and killings, then, logically, as I stated on the phone last night, this means you either know the killer or are
the killer.’

‘I do not know the killer. I am not the killer.’

‘Then how do you know the motive?’

‘I also told you, on the phone last night, I was once the pope’s adviser on all matters relating to the occult.’

‘That is indeed what you told me.’ Rosen made a mental note to check the claim.

Silence, broken only by the drone of a tractor in the distant countryside.

‘How does your former occupation give you an insight into the motive for the murders? How does your expertise in the occult allow you to know how the killer got into Julia Caton’s
home?’

A battered gathering of hardback and paperback books by the bedside.
The Holy Bible NIV
.
Malleus Maleficarum.
St Augustine’s
Confessions.
St Julian of
Norwich’s
Revelations of Divine Love. Thomas à Kempis. Songs of Innocence and Experience
by William Blake
.

Rosen touched his throat.

‘Insight, Father Sebastian – what is your insight into the killer’s motive?’

‘These are copycat killings, I suspect. Does the name Alessio Capaneus mean anything to you?’

‘Should it?’

‘Not really. He’s a fairly obscure figure, remembered by few. It’s my belief, I’m afraid, that he’s at the root of these abductions and killings.’

‘Who is Alessio Capaneus?’

‘Was. He’s dead.’

‘Who was Alessio Capaneus?’

‘He was alive somewhere around 1265; his date of birth is not certain but he died for sure in 1291. There’s no doubt about his demise.’

Rosen was suddenly visited by the notion that he’d seen the priest before, that he knew his face, but couldn’t fix it in a time or place.

‘Who was he?’

‘He was a necromancer, one who conjures up the dead to learn the secrets of heaven and hell. He lived in Florence.’

‘In the thirteenth century?’

Because it was officially his day off, Rosen couldn’t charge the priest with wasting police time, but he couldn’t help his desperate disappointment showing in his slowly sinking
shoulders.

‘David, you’re looking at me as if I should be in a psychiatric unit, not a monastery.’

‘No, I’m . . . I’m sure I’ve seen you before.’

Was he one of those vague rambling men who used to haunt the day room when Sarah was ill in hospital?
If so,
thought Rosen,
I must be kind to the priest, and patient, not let my
disappointment show.

‘I’m sorry, Father, you were saying.’

‘Very little is known about him. He abducted and killed six Florentine women and removed their babies from their wombs.’

‘That’s why you said he’d take one more woman after Julia Caton?’

‘Exactly. There is one telling detail: the audacious manner of abducting his fifth victim from her home by breaking into the house next door. It’s my view that Capaneus was pouring
contempt on the Florentine authorities and cranking up the terror. But so little else is known. It’s as if the human race made a decision long ago to wipe the memory of Capaneus from the face
of the earth. A fragment here, a mention there in a footnote. Some scholars – the ones who have heard of him – even deny his existence, claiming it as a medieval myth, one of many
designed to control and suppress women.’

‘If there’s any information about him, it’s bound to be on the internet,’ observed Rosen.

‘We don’t have the internet here. Or TV. We do have a radio. This is how I learned of the murders in the capital.’

‘I have a laptop. We could look him up on the internet, before I leave.’

‘We’d have to OK it with Aidan, he’s in charge.’

Rosen searched Sebastian’s face for a smile, a flicker of irony, but he was deadpan.

Sebastian picked up the picture that had fallen onto the floor and looked at the image, showing only the blank side to Rosen. He placed it face downwards on the pillow.

‘Aren’t you going to put the picture back on the wall?’ suggested Rosen.

‘This afternoon perhaps.’

Rosen wanted to know which single image the priest would exhibit in the confines of his cell and said, ‘No time like the present.’

‘Then I’ll have nothing to do later on today.’

‘Coffee. Let’s have a coffee.’

Rosen suspended the interview, shut down the dictaphone and followed the priest out of the poverty of his narrow room.

T
he kitchen at St Mark’s was stone-built but warm from the iron ovens, and full of the aroma of bread and coffee.
A great hideout from
the world
, thought Rosen.

Aidan stood at a distance that professed a lack of interest in the internet but at an angle that allowed him to see the screen.