Roger Curtis - Lights in a Western Sky

As for the shawl, we had seen it rise into the air as the rotor blades began whirling. Too late to do anything about it, and impossible to predict the fickleness of human nature.

Lianne has never been back to the island. Increasingly I get up to find her having been writing since dawn to complete her account of how, as a research student, she had come across an obscure and still unknown medieval manuscript that led us to the island, and of her imposture as a nun. She says it is better to consolidate her career as a biblical scholar – she has just been made an assistant professor – before our story of the deception breaks. Such is avarice.

From time to time I return to the island, but only to take tourists up the mountain, or occasionally fly them to the monastery in my own helicopter. I aim to arrive about twelve, giving them ample time to tour the chapel and the shrine and for the more intrepid to venture to the summit, where an enormous cross now stands. But if they do the climb the chances are they will have to forego the pleasures of Sister Maria’s crusts. We need to be gone by two; too much exposure of the place could still be risky.

Whenever I am on the island I make a point of visiting Father Kalvos. Sometimes, at quiet moments, I catch him gazing anxiously up at the mountain, for Sister Anna was never replaced.

Bentley gave one last desperate tug, and he was free, leaving only wisps of his coat sleeve to the teeth of the closing door. Alex, Sargon’s son, was not so lucky. For a moment Bentley contemplated the anguish through the stocking covered head as it moved behind the plate glass. He was reminded of a fish in an aquarium, desperate for food, except that Alex’s gaze was not on him, but searching wildly for escape. Then Bentley saw him produce the gun, which he shouldn’t have brought, because they had agreed it. It was difficult to tell whether the single sudden crack was of breaking glass or gun-shot. Whichever, the clear glass in an instant fractured like a car windscreen does to a stone and Alex, still trapped, was lost from sight – although not to Bentley’s consciousness. Then another alarm began to sound. Bentley’s grip on his case tightened as he turned to confront the options that were as terrible as they were unplanned.

No time to consider that Alex was the one who had hung behind, had minced back across the marble floor and peered over the counter to where the second assistant – the one they had not at first seen – had pressed the alarm button. And, extending his arm and pointing the gun downwards, had not even seen his target as the trigger was pulled. But the scream had told him to run and Bentley, at the door, had waited as long as he dared. Yet, he was Sargon’s son, and Bentley, as number two in the gang, had been responsible.

With his back to the door the choices were stark. To his right the car, black and funereal at the end of the dark alley, had already begun to move, just as they had agreed. Slowly, no fuss, uncompromisingly, it drew forward. Twenty seconds worth of time, maybe. To the left, equidistant, figures moving in the high street, beneath street lamps radiating yellow through the dank night air. The jewels bulging heavily in his case weighed against the fate of Sargon’s son – possible gain against abject failure and worse. So Bentley ran, his coat flapping over his coal-black suit. Towards people, and into a mire from which he might, if he was lucky, pull himself free. The human filter that absorbed him clogged the car’s progress, muffling the crazed horn and the single, wild shot. They had risked much with that, and it quantified his plight.

The street was still unsafe. Along its length the pimps, the three-trick fraudsters, the beggars, were half of them Sargon’s men, with their mobiles communicado , just as capable of swarming – when the order came – as dissolving into the night. Bentley, with his hat pulled down and coat collar up, tripped his way through them as nimbly as his bulky frame allowed.

His car, known only to him – as, heaven be praised, he had just stolen it – was parked too far away to be reached safely. Most of the shops were now closed, and those that weren’t were unlikely to give refuge to a criminal they knew only as an extortioner. And dead-end alleys, in his experience, tended to be just that, in fact as well as metaphorically. Then, suddenly, he was confronted by a back he knew well, moulding itself to the pillar of a traffic light, mobile scrunched between shoulder and jaw, the body seething with alertness despite its sack-like frame. Bentley dared not pass, nor attempt to cross the road. He looked to his side, hesitantly, then again into the depths of a building – a church – that he had never before entered and did not know.

The girl at the door smiled in a way that Bentley barely recognised – benignly, without intent. She handed him a piece of paper as he passed and he took it with head down, but missing nothing. At first he sat in the rearmost pew, but that was too exposed. Further forward now, the pews filled up around him. Thus trapped, he thought again of Sargon’s son. A priest ascended the pulpit. Bentley scanned his companions, identifying one that matched his own appearance whose movements he determined he would follow exactly. For the first time he glanced at the piece of paper he still held – a service in memory of Philip Ironside, he read. The girl next to him, pretty in black but with the hollow eyes of grief, smiled sweetly and asked him how he knew the boy. ‘Only distantly,’ Bentley replied, ‘but he was a fine young fellow. And you?’ ‘He was my cousin,’ she replied, and he watched a tear course down her cheek. Once, while he was kneeling, the door behind banged. There were footsteps, aggressively into the body of the church, but they receded and the door slammed shut. When the service ended the girl smiled again. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll stay a while longer,’ Bentley replied, sinking to his knees and bowing his head, and touching the case beside him, just to be sure. ‘Well, Philip Ironside, you’ve gained a friend by dying, that’s for sure,’ he muttered. ‘That’s a first in my experience.’

Then he thought of Sargon in his office overlooking the boxing-ring. They would all be there now, at their wits end – Cowley, Quintex, Elias the Greek – heads bowed, desperate to account for the double failure. They would try to call on Bentley’s mother, and his sister Beth. He was glad that he’d moved them to safety, though for him that was a usual precaution before a job. Then, with no other leads, they would wait in his own room next to the Spread Eagle and when he didn’t appear, trash it. Sargon would contact tougher men better trained to seek out and kill. And it would take a hard man to get Bentley.

His mother was hard like himself, and responsible for creating him in her own image. But Beth, his sister, was guileless, a teacher by vocation who never quite believed the mountain of circumstantial evidence that spoke – or rather screamed – of her brother’s fifteen years of crime. He was Uncle Ben to her fatherless child and the nearest thing either of them had to a family.

Within the church the mourners had gone, but a new set immediately invaded the space behind him. An older crowd this time, milling around a sharp voice that lectured them on city churches. As a body they marched into one of the side chapels, leaving Bentley to contemplate the piles of clothing draped over the last pew. He took off his overcoat and exchanged it for one that was colourful and loud, with a bobble hat to match. Then he found a scarf for which he had nothing to offer in exchange. More confident now, he set off to look for his car, hoping that the police had not yet traced it. Once he looked back, and in his mind saw his own name, Philip Bentley – for Philip was his name also – on a similar order of service. But the church was black and desolate and he knew of no-one, besides his sister, who would remotely wish to hand out anything that had to do with him.