Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

Another crow heckled the dead from somewhere in the birches and oaks, then flapped further into the chaos of ivy green. The large portals of the dynastic tombs gawped at Ibsen. Like open mouths. Shocked.

She squeezed his hand. ‘Moreover, some psychologists believe that we can actually be physically aroused by death itself. We find it erotically pleasurable to die. Relatedly, the French call an orgasm le petit mort, the little death. Shelley called the climax the death which lovers love.’

Ibsen murmured, ‘Hanged men are said to orgasm. Hmm. At the moment of asphyxiation.’ He shook his head, ‘It’s prison folklore. I’ve often wondered if there was any truth in it… but I don’t know…’

They were right at the end of the path, heading back towards daylight: the trees and shrubs and menacing tombs were yielding to street noise. Ibsen felt an urgent need to jog, to get the heck out of here.

‘This also fits with the idea that you are dealing with a cult, or a secret religion,’ Jenny added. ‘Because many religions in the past have played upon the eros-pain nexus.’

‘Once more in English?’

‘Think of the Catholics, think of Saint Theresa ecstatically pierced by arrows. Or some Shia Muslims, flaying themselves — that could be sexual. Or even the Nazis. The skulls of the SS. They certainly sexualized and fetishized pain and death, the smart black uniforms, the totenkopf.’

‘Christ! You’re saying we’re dealing with some kinky Nazi-Catholic-Muslim sex cult. In central London?’

‘I’m just giving you ideas!’ She smiled, and looked at her watch. ‘Anyway. Time’s up. Emergency C-sections won’t wait, not even for handsome detectives.’

‘But-’

She was already kissing him, and already walking to the cemetery gate. He followed, still asking questions; she waved her hand impatiently.

‘I’m just guessing, Mark! But I’ve got to go. Bye, sweetheart — don’t forget to get some milk!’

She waved goodbye, and was gone. Running down Highgate Hill. Sweet and young and happy. His lovely and intelligent wife. Ibsen gazed at the dark blue of her anorak until she was entirely lost to view.

Then he made his slow way past the venerable redbrick Georgian houses to Highgate Tube, which was so confusingly far from Highgate Village.

His phone trilled. He took the call. Larkham.

‘Antonio Ritter!’

‘What?’

Detective Sergeant Larkham repeated, rushing his words in his excitement,

‘Tony Ritter. The man with the tatts. S’his name, sir. He lives at the address, near the Barbican, we’ve seen him going in. American. Half Puerto Rican. In and out of prison. FBI record. Smart. Links to the Camorra.’

‘I’m on my way. Text me the details. Meet you there. Now.’

‘Sir.’

Ibsen snapped shut the call. Even as he felt the excitement rise, he felt the doubts. A simple career criminal? That didn’t quite fit. What was a gangster doing in the middle of this? But his wife’s ideas were all too chillingly believable. Some kind of suicide cult.

This meant there could be — there must be — many more victims out there. Waiting to die. At any moment.

Temple Bruer, Lincoln Heath

‘“Temple Bruer grew up in the middle of the vast Lincoln Heath, which spread out south of the city. The heath would have always been sparsely populated, and in the Templars’ time would have been especially desolate and forbidding.”’

‘Unlike now,’ said Adam, ‘when it is so amazingly inviting. Jesus, this road is useless.’

Nina put her father’s book down and gazed across the flatness. Everything was flat, monotonous, and bleak. The morning snow had turned to heavy sleet — which thrashed the windscreen, almost defeating the wipers’ effortful thump.

‘Could that be it?’

Adam followed her gesturing hand. As far as he could tell, she was pointing at rain-smeared glass, blank grey sky, and endless fields of grey grass. And nothing else.

‘What?’

‘There. That building. Over there.’

Adam slowed the car, entirely blocking the narrow country lane. It didn’t seem to matter. Theirs was probably the only vehicle for miles. He hoped it was the only vehicle for miles: therefore, no one was pursuing them. And now he saw.

‘Ah… Yes.’

He could just make out the low darkness of some buildings, half-concealed behind a copse of stark trees. He drove on very, very slowly. The mud churned; pebbles rattled against the chassis; the wheels slid and groaned.

‘A sign. Adam.’

He gazed up; she was right. A tiny and splintered wooden sign, virtually hidden by blackthorns, showed the way.

Temple Bruer. Ancient Monument. 1? miles.

Adam wrenched the car left and they patrolled the little side-lane. He could see patches of snow left in the ragged fields, and hazel and holly trees, sheared by the easterlies. ‘So… We know your dad spent a whole day here… it must be important. Right?’

‘He goes on about the loneliness.’ Nina scanned the lines quickly. ‘Apparently, in the eighteenth century this was the one part of the London-to-York route which stagecoach owners couldn’t insure. Too many highwaymen. Too many legends of witches and ghosts.’

Her face was looking his way: white and uncertain in the gloom of the car. Then she turned, and scanned the rainy horizon. Adam could make out a tower now. Barns and a kind of farmhouse — and a squat grey tower.

‘Listen to this. “The Reverend Dr G Oliver, vicar of the nearby village of Scopwick, undertook the first historical survey of the surviving tower of Temple Bruer preceptory.”’

‘And?’

‘“Oliver reported finding charred bones and bodies encased in walls, evidence of murder and infanticide. He proposed that these remains had belonged to victims of severe Templar law enforcement.”’

‘Seriously?’

‘Quite serious. My dad actually quotes Oliver’s survey. Verbatim. “Some of these vaults were appropriated to uses that it is revolting to allude to. In one of them a niche or cell was discovered, which had been carefully walled up; and within it the skeleton of a man, who appears to have died in a sitting posture, for his head and arms were found hanging between the legs. Another skeleton of an aged man was found in these dungeons; his body seems to have been thrown down without order or decency, for he lay doubled up. And in the fore part of his skull were two holes which had evidently been produced by violence.”’

‘Christ.’

They were just a hundred yards away now; and the sense of remoteness was deepening. Just a few miles from a main road, yet they were lost in England’s deep and darkening winter.

‘Wait.’ Nina turned a page. ‘There’s more. “In a second corner of these vaults, many indications of burning exist: cinders mixed with human skulls and bones. This horrible cavern has also been closed up with masonry.”’ She read on, silently, then half-closed the book, ‘Look, you can park here. By the tree.’

She was right. The road, which was now little better than a mudded track, opened out into a kind of farmyard which surrounded the ancient Templar tower. A light was already on inside the farmhouse. They climbed warily from the car. The sleet had abated, yet the very air was soaked.

‘Are we just allowed to park here? Is this private property?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said, shivering, and pulling up the hood of her anorak. ‘Dad’s guide always indicates when a site is private, doesn’t say that here. I guess the farm must date from the Templar times, but the buildings have changed? Ach. Imagine living in a house with this… thing in your back garden. Staring at the vaults where they walled up people. Children entombed alive. Spookfest.’