Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

They searched the bathroom and found trailing smears of blood on the shower curtain and dark crimson blood drops in the toilet bowl. The bathroom floor was oddly clean.

The kitchen revealed something worse: a sink covered with blood, as if a small mammal had been crudely slaughtered over the plughole.

Larkham pointed with a pen. ‘What is that?’

It was a sliver of flesh, lying on the bottom of the metal sink, surrounded by thick gobbets of blood. Was the flesh human? It was so mangled it was impossible to tell.

Ibsen didn’t know whether to feel sick or scared. ‘Larkham — the bedroom — she must be in there.’

The bedroom door was at the end of the landing. They pushed against it, but it seemed to be obstructed by a rucked carpet: a second, heavier shove got it open.

Ibsen didn’t know what he had expected to find in the bedroom; he didn’t care to imagine it. But he certainly didn’t expect to find nothing.

Yet there was no one in the bedroom. No body, no suicide victim, nothing. The bedsheets were liberally marked with blood, a white cotton T-shirt was also rusted with drying blood. The room was in chaos: a mirror was smashed, a TV was lying on the carpet, drawers had been flung open and clothing scattered, as if a fetishist had been seeking underwear, but there was no one here, and no one in the bedroom. Lots of blood but no body?

The flat was empty.

‘So what happened?’ Ibsen gazed at his own crazed reflection in the shattered mirror. ‘The guy came here and took her? Why did no one see this? Or hear anything?’

Larkham was opening the floor-to-ceiling wardrobes. The wardrobes were big; the whole flat was large and airy. This was a rich girl, yet another rich kid, with her own flat in a pricey part of town and lots of nice clothes, and she was very probably dead and yet her body had disappeared.

‘Sir.’

‘What?’

‘Jesus…’ Larkham’s voice was uncharacteristically choked. ‘She’s here, sir.’

Ibsen stiffened his resolve, and came across the room. If Larkham was shocked by the sight of the body, it had to be pretty bad.

It was far worse than pretty bad.

Imogen Fitzsimmons’s body was huddled in a corner of her own wardrobe, kneeling on the floor staring at the expensive coats.

In her stiff, blood-caked left hand the girl clutched an old-fashioned cut-throat razor, stained with blood.

The body was clothed: she was wearing tight skinny jeans and white socks. And a black T-shirt with a small Guinness logo. The blackness of the T-shirt made the body look almost normal — from the neck down. It had evidently absorbed a lot of blood but the redness didn’t show. And before she died, this young woman had obviously used the razor to progressively mutilate her face.

Ibsen closed his eyes as he felt the vertigo of nausea hit him. He calmed himself with two deep breaths, then looked again at poor Imogen Fitzsimmons’s face.

It was difficult to work out quite what she had done to herself in her final hours, so elaborate was the cutting. She seemed to have sliced off her own lips, which gave the horrible impression that she was grinning fiendishly: like a skull. She had also cut open her nostrils, or at least tried to. The damage was too complex to see which parts of her nose remained intact. The earlobes were missing: drools of blood trailed down each side of her neck.

Most disturbing was the way she had diligently sliced out the flesh of her cheeks, as if she had been trying to skeletonize herself. The skin and flesh had been so drastically cut away that the teeth and the bone were partly visible through the holes in the side of her face. She was half pretty young woman, half bleeding, horrific skull.

Larkham was pale and perspiring. ‘How could anyone do that? To themselves?’

It was too much. The two officers gazed at the corpse. Helpless, dwarfed, and mute.

Then, as they stared at the white face of Imogen Fitzsimmons, the girl’s head tilted, and she blinked, and a trickle of blood ran from her lipless mouth, as she desperately tried to mumble a word.

She was still alive.

The Angel Inn, Penhill, Yorkshire

It would have been an idyllic setting, Adam thought, if they hadn’t come here to discuss the terminal illness of Archibald McLintock.

The pub was timbered and earthy; a huge log fire roared at one end in a baronial hearth, a dog snoozing before the flames. Two farm-workers sat in a corner, nursing pints of Theakstons, conversing away the gloomy winter afternoon. The bar even had a buxom and giggling maid. She served the farmer, William Surtees, who returned to their table with a tray.

‘You didn’t have to buy the drinks.’

Surtees returned his change to the watchpocket of his mustard-coloured waistcoat. ‘Nonsense. Least I could do. I should learn not to be so — gah — indiscreet.’

Nina took her pint of Guinness and Adam his half-pint of orange juice. Surtees sipped at a scotch and water, then said, ‘Now, please, what can I tell you? How can I redress things?’

‘Start at the start. How did you know my father?’

‘He first came here ten years ago. Researching the Templars. The preceptory is on my land. Most people who come sightseeing just jump the gate and have a gander, but your father very graciously asked permission to visit the site, in person. Subsequently, we became acquainted. I saw him about once a year, sometimes more: he would stop over if he was driving down to London. We’re just twenty miles from the A1, though you wouldn’t know it. Darkest Yorkshire!’

‘He never mentioned you.’

‘We weren’t boon companions! But definitely friends, in a distant way. I would look forward to seeing his old car pulling into the farm, that Volkswagen you were driving.’

‘He gave it to me last year. Bought himself a big shiny new one.’

Surtees nodded. ‘Well. That’s why I stopped just now, when I saw that car. Hold on, I thought, that’s old Archie’s car. And of course I knew, from the terrible… from the… ah… from the ah… that he couldn’t be driving it. Most perplexing. But here we are. The Angel Inn. You know there are often Angel Inns wherever there are Templar sites? Archie told me that.’

Adam interrupted. ‘So when did you last see him?’

‘July last year, I believe.’

‘July 24th?’

‘Yes, quite possibly.’

‘Is this when…?’ Adam paused and looked at Nina; she urged him on with a fierce but subtle nod. ‘Is this when he told you he was dying?’

‘Yes. He stayed over, at the farm. My wife was away and he and I stayed up late and had a few jars. He liked a drink. And then it justWell he just confessed. He said he had terminal cancer, had a year or two to live at most. Awful. But he was keeping it quiet. As many do.’

Silence. The dog was staring at Adam, for no reason. Baring its fangs. Surtees elaborated, ‘The strange thing was he didn’t seem that downcast. He was of course upset. But more for his children, for you, Nina, and… Hannah, is it? Working in London?’

‘Yes, Hannah.’

‘It was your future that concerned him most. The girls. He worried about you, your financial future and suchlike. But other than that he wasn’t perhaps as depressed as one might have anticipated. Actually he was quite enthused. Gloomy yet enthused. An odd mix.’

‘Enthused about what?’

‘He said he had some startling new theory. Relating to the Templars. A radical new departure. Wouldn’t tell me more. Probably would have gone whoosh right over my head anyway! But, yes, that’s what he said, he was intellectually excited by it. Very sad, in retrospect. Did he ever publish anything?’

‘Nothing,’ said Adam. ‘That’s one of the reasons we’re here. Following up clues: we’re trying to find out what he was researching.’