Simon Toyne - The Key

Gabriel began to slow as he approached his cell but another shove sent him stumbling straight past. He recovered his balance and kept on walking, his mind racing with the implications. He had been kept in solitary so far, which had suited him fine. A new cell could mean new cellmates. Not good.

They continued walking deeper into the maze. Paint bubbled on the walls where salts had seeped through the rock and nobody had bothered to fix it. There were fewer cells here and the ones they passed were all empty. It smelled mustier too. Unused. They reached the end of the corridor and another sharp shove sent Gabriel barrelling through a set of fire doors into a short tunnel chopped cleanly in half by a wall of bars. On the other side was a cell containing a steel toilet with no seat, a narrow bench built into the wall and a man so large he made everything around him seem as if it belonged in a child’s nursery.

‘Hands through the bars,’ the sub-inspector ordered.

The giant took one huge step forward, covering the entire width of the cell, and passed wrists as thick as sprinter’s legs through the bars. His eyes never left Gabriel’s face.

Gabriel was grabbed from behind and slammed sideways into the wall. ‘Make a move and I’ll stick you with the taser, understand?’ The guard’s breath smelled of coffee and cigarettes.

Gabriel nodded and felt the pressure ease as the guard turned his attention to the giant. It had surprised him when the stocky weightlifter of a sub-inspector had come alone to take him to his cell. Now he knew why: one cop meant less witnesses.

He glanced up at the smoke detector and closed-circuit camera bolted to the underside of the ducting that ran the length of the corridor, one of the old kind that produced a fuzzy black-and-white picture but no sound. The feed would be routed to the control room he’d passed on his way through the entrance gate. Another cop was probably watching now, ready to send in backup if anything went down. Except the camera wasn’t pointing at the cell. So no one could see what was happening inside it; and once the sub-inspector had locked the door and walked away, no one would care.

His eyes returned to the hulking figure on the other side of the bars. The giant was staring straight at him with the cold-eyed menace of a cell-block challenge. Gabriel held his gaze, taking him in, knowing now that looking away would spare him nothing. The man’s eyes were set deep in a flat face that was topped off by a surprisingly conservatively cut bowl of blond hair that he might’ve ripped off an insurance salesman to wear as a hat.

Gabriel held the bottomless eyes for another beat then took in the rest of him. He was immense; a caricature of a man sculpted from solid muscle by years of steroids and single-minded aggression. A cotton shirt strained to contain him, sleeves rolled up over meaty forearms. The handcuffs looked small and ridiculous on his thick wrists and, just above them, was something else that set alarm bells ringing in Gabriel’s head. It was the blurry blue image of a jailhouse tattoo. Generally speaking, the larger the tattoo, the more time its owner had spent in prison. This one was huge. But it wasn’t the giant’s evident criminal past, or even his intimidating size, that caused Gabriel the most concern, it was what the tattoo depicted. The huge image — created by pouring ink on his arm and repeatedly sticking a pin into himself until it was fixed there for ever — was a cross. Somewhere in this steroid-fried monster’s dark past he had found the light of God. And now the Church had found him, and clearly sent him on a mission to do their dark work.

Escape was no longer an option, it was a necessity. Once the guard had strolled away down the corridor Gabriel would be on his own, locked in the bowels of the earth, with this God-loving monster — and unless he did something fast, he would never get out of here alive.

Room 406, Davlat Hastenesi Hospital

Kathryn Mann stared at the object that had just slipped out of the evidence bag on to the hospital bed.

Arkadian had not stayed long. The memory of the last time they had met had hung too heavy over both of them, so he had made his peace offering and left.

‘We found it among your father’s things,’ he had told her. ‘There’s a message for you in there. I thought you should see it.’

Inside the evidence bag she had found a book, bound in leather with a thong wrapped round a button on the cover to keep it closed. Just seeing it had misted her eyes. It was the same old-fashioned make of journal her father had always used. She reached to the bedside table to retrieve her reading glasses then carefully unwound the thong to loosen the cover and found the note written across the middle two pages in her father’s neat hand: My dearest Kathryn, My love and light. I believe my work is over now and my return to Ruin will be for good this time. I hope I am wrong, but suspect I am not. No matter. I have lived long and you have filled those years with warmth and joy. If I do live, I will keep my promise and show you the next step, as I always said I would. If not, then you must discover it for yourself and decide whether to forgive me. Know only that what I kept from you I did for your sake, and for the safety of my grandson. Kiss Gabriel for me, and light a candle to my name so I may talk to you still. All my love, for now and always, Oscar de la Cruz

Every other page was empty. She reread his note, looking to see if she had missed something, but it remained as opaque as the first time she had read it. What had he kept from her? She had always thought they shared everything, that there were no secrets between them; only now, in death, had she discovered this was not so.

She remembered how, even when she was a small child, he had shared confidences with her, explaining that they were different from other people, that they were descendants of the Mala, the oldest tribe on earth, usurped by another who had sought to destroy them and bury the knowledge they kept. He had shown her their secret symbols, taught her the Mala language and revealed the mission they shared to restore rightful order to the world. But he had kept something from her so important that he had felt compelled to confess it from beyond the grave. Maybe she hadn’t known him as well as she’d thought.

Even the note contained something that jarred with her memory of him. He had always been so particular about words, insisting on precision because they carried the most precious cargo of all — meaning. And yet here was a mistake: he had not asked her to light a candle ‘in’ his name, but ‘to’ it.

Then she realized.

It wasn’t a mistake at all.

When she was a girl he had also taught her how their ancestors had kept their secrets. One method was to record messages on paper using lemon juice instead of ink. When the juice dried it was invisible, but the acids affected the paper so that a flame held against it would darken these sections first and reveal the hidden words on the page. When Oscar had written that he wanted her to light a candle ‘to’ his name so he might talk to her still, he had meant precisely that.

There was another message in the space beneath his signature. All she needed to read it was a flame.

Police Headquarters, Ruin

Gabriel’s body flooded with adrenalin as his mind ran through possible scenarios. If he ended up alone in the cell with the giant he would die. He had to do something in the next few seconds, before the guard locked him in. He glanced up at the low ceiling of the cell block, less than a foot above his head at the highest point. Not much room for manoeuvre. Fortunately the guard was short, which gave him a few extra inches, but he was also built like an Olympic weightlifter — and he was armed. As well as a taser he had a riot baton and a can of pepper spray clipped to his belt. At least he didn’t have a gun.