Simon Toyne - Bestselling Conspiracy Thriller Trilogy - Sanctus, The Key, The Tower

For God’s sake, take the Pethedine , Liv thought.

An advocate of the healing properties of plants she may have been; a masochist she most definitely was not. Bonnie’s screaming soared to a new zenith and her hand shot out to grab Myron, knocking the entire contents of the blue box on to the shiny vinyl floor.

Liv’s cell phone rang in her pocket.

She felt for the ‘off’ button through the thick cotton of her cargo pants and pressed hard, hoping to catch it before it rang again. No one gave the slightest indication they even remembered she was there. She fished the phone out and glanced down at the scratched grey screen, made sure it was definitely off, then returned her attention, just in time, to the unfolding story in the room.

Bonnie’s eyes rolled back in her head and her heavily pregnant form crumpled to the floor, despite the best efforts of Myron and the midwife to keep her upright. Instinctively, Liv dived for the emergency cord dangling by her side and pulled as hard as she could.

Within seconds the room filled with orderlies fluttering around Bonnie like moths, crunching homeopathic pills underfoot. A trolley appeared from nowhere and she was wheeled from the room, away from Liv and the gentle music of the shoreline, down the hallway to another room full of the latest drugs and clinical equipment.

Ruin Homicide shared office space with the Robbery Division on the fourth floor of a new glass block built behind the carved stone façade of the original police building. The office was open-plan and noisy. Men in shirtsleeves perched on the edge of desks and tipped back in chairs as they talked loudly into phones or with each other.

Arkadian sat at his desk with his hand clamped to his ear, trying to listen to the answer-phone message on the number he’d just called. A woman’s voice. American. Confident sounding. Direct. Late twenties or early thirties. He hung up rather than leaving a message. You never got any information by leaving messages. Best just to keep on trying until whoever you were calling got curious and picked up.

He dropped the handset into its cradle and tapped the space-bar on his keyboard to banish the screensaver. The photos from the examination table appeared. With his eyes he traced the neat scars snaking across the dead monk’s body, strange lines and crosses that ultimately formed one giant question mark.

Since the post-mortem, the mystery of the monk’s identity had deepened. The Citadel still hadn’t claimed him as one of their own, and all the regular methods of victim identification had so far drawn a blank. His fingerprints had come back unknown. Ditto his dental records. His DNA swabs were still working their way through the labs, but unless the dead man had been arrested for a sex crime, a homicide or some kind of terrorist activity it was unlikely he was going to show up on any of those databases either. And Arkadian’s boss was starting to lean on him for some kind of progress report; he wanted to draw a line under this thing. So did Arkadian, but he wasn’t going to whitewash it. The monk belonged to someone. It was his job to find out whom.

He glanced at the clock on the far wall. It was now a little after one in the afternoon. His wife would just be getting in from the school where she helped out three days a week. He dialled his own number and clicked on the lower left corner of his computer screen to open up a browser window while he listened to it connecting.

His wife picked up on the third ring. She sounded breathless.

‘It’s me,’ Arkadian said, tapping ‘ Religion’ and ‘ Scars’ into the search box and hitting return.

‘Heeeey,’ she said, drawing out the middle of the word in a way that still got him twelve years after he’d first heard it. ‘You coming home?’

Arkadian frowned as the results came back, all four hundred and thirty-one thousand of them.

‘Not yet,’ he said, scrolling through the first page.

‘Then what are you calling for, getting a girl’s hopes up?’

‘Just wanted to hear your voice. How was work?’

‘Tiring. You try teaching English to a roomful of nine-year-olds. I must’ve read The Hungry Caterpillar at least a couple of hundred times. Though by the end, there was one kid I swear could read it better than me.’

He could tell from her voice she was smiling. She was always happiest when she’d spent the morning in a room full of kids. The realization also made him feel sad.

‘Sounds like a know-all,’ he said. ‘You should get him to read it to the class next time, see how he copes under pressure.’

‘It’s a girl, actually. Girls are cleverer than boys.’

Arkadian smiled. ‘Yes, but you end up marrying us. So you can’t be all that bright.’

‘But then we divorce you and take all your money.’

‘I don’t have any money.’

‘Oh well … then I guess you’re pretty safe.’

He clicked on a link and scrolled through pictures of tribesmen with raw wounds slashed red into ebony flesh. None of them matched the scars on the monk.

‘So what case are you working?’ she asked. ‘Anything gruesome?’

‘The monk.’

‘You find out who he is yet, or can’t you say?’

‘I can’t say because I don’t know.’ He clicked back to the results page and opened a link dealing with stigmata, the unexplained phenomenon of wounds similar to those Christ suffered during his crucifixion appearing on ordinary people.

‘So you going to be late?’

‘Too early to tell. They want to get this one squared away.’

‘Which means “yes”.’

‘Which means “probably”.’

‘Well … just be careful.’

‘I’m sitting at my desk doing Google searches.’

‘Then come home.’

‘I always do.’

‘Love you.’

‘You too,’ he whispered.

He looked up at the office, humming with noise and attitude. Most of the people currently occupying it were either divorced or well on their way, but he knew that would never happen to him. He was married to his wife, not the job; and even though that choice had meant he’d never been given the sexy, high-profile cases from which careers and reputations were made, he didn’t mind. He wouldn’t swap his life with any of them. Besides, there was something about this suicide that made him feel he might just have caught a live one. He clicked randomly on one of the stigmata websites and started to read.

The site was pretty academic and consisted of dense, dry text only occasionally punctuated by a juicy photo of a bleeding hand or foot, though none of them matched the scars he’d found on the monk.

He removed his glasses and rubbed at the indentations they left on the side of his nose when he wore them too long, which was every day of his working life. He knew he should be getting on with his other cases while he waited for word to come down from the Citadel, or until the American woman answered her phone, but the case was already getting under his skin: the apparent public martyrdom, the ritualized scars, the fact that the monk didn’t appear to officially exist.

He closed the search window and spent the next twenty minutes typing the few facts he had gathered and his initial thoughts and observations into the case file. When he had finished he reread his notes, then jogged back through the post-mortem photos until he found the one he was looking for.

He looked again at the thin strip of leather laid out on the evidence tray, the harsh light of the camera flash picking out the twelve numbers scratched crudely on its surface. He copied them into his mobile phone then closed the file, grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair and headed for the door. He needed some air and something to eat. He always thought better when he was on the move.