Richard Beard - Acts of the Assassins

A red sun will climb above the horizon, and Cassius Gallio will attune to the holiday excitement. The black girls tell a nun that at his Antioch conference Paul shared the platform with a disciple, it said so in their parish newsletter. The Jesus passengers are enthusiastic but ill-informed. A man in a fleece winks, a punch-line coming up, and says it’s nice to take the bus because on his last church trip he had to walk. Santiago de Compostela. Two hundred miles on foot to touch the bones of James.

The bones. Only now will Cassius Gallio spare a thought for bones. The disciples continue to exist as relics after they die, but however long he lives Gallio will never understand how the bones of James travelled from the city of Jerusalem to the coast of north-west Spain. The when and how rarely matter to pilgrims: every Christian tripper has walked all or part of the Camino, and the once-in-a-lifetime adventure provides a lifetime’s subject of conversation. James the disciple of Jesus will and will not end his days in Jerusalem, and even though the authenticity of the Compostela bones remains unproven, future believers will forever keep on walking.

In the second hour of the coach trip the conversation fades, and Gallio rests his head against the window. He will sleep lightly, meaning not well. He will dream of his head pattering the glass of the emergency exit, of the stutter of his past and of fragments from his life yet to come.

‘Hi, I’m Claudia.’

They know. Valeria has just introduced her. She’s Claudia the highly rated analyst, arrived from Rome this morning. ‘I’m joining you on background research.’

She has a face that makes Gallio think of the future, of what his life would be like with Claudia as part of it. That’s his Speculator first impression, he tells himself. After further objective assessment, of her dark eyes and angled jaw, he decides that she’s not unreasonably pretty but she is an impeccable shape, slim at the waist, broad-hipped. Probably not that useful in a scrap, to be honest, no bone weight.

‘You two can’t do everything.’ Valeria sucks her teeth, as if to dislodge the taste of the little they’ve done. ‘I’ve asked Claudia to give you a briefing.’

Claudia walks over to the new incident board, now in place and dominating the far wall of the case room. At the top in the centre is an artist’s impression of Jesus, which only Gallio knows is the image based on James. The incident board looks like a family tree, with lines of connection branching from Jesus at the top down to the more prominent disciples: Peter, Thomas, John, Andrew. Then more lines connecting to a bottom row of disciples who are less well known. The hard bald face of Paul is the odd man out. His image is pinned mid-row in a gap between John and Philip.

Cassius Gallio, as a professional, evaluates Claudia as she talks, and he’s careful not to miss anything: grey sweater, black trousers, highish black heels. Quite tall, good hips. He remembers he already noticed the hips. Unprofessional. To the heels and back again. He doesn’t think anyone notices.

First presentation, unfamiliar surroundings, so as a young woman she brings her business voice.

‘I’m up to speed with the context,’ she says, ‘and my job is to work out why Thomas and Philip are dead, and whether these murders connect either to each other or to your recently launched enquiry into a certain missing person. James may also be relevant, if we pick up obvious echoes.’

Claudia is efficient, but also vulnerable, because there must be more to her than efficiency. Whatever she’s hiding, Gallio thinks, she can be found out.

‘What type of connections?’ Baruch asks. ‘I presume you mean whether they were killed by the same person.’

Gallio suspects Baruch knows the answer but wants Claudia’s attention. So transparent. Claudia takes a red marker pen from Baruch’s desk and turns to the incident board. She taps on the images for James, Thomas and Philip, the three dead disciples. Gallio hasn’t seen this picture of James before, kneeling in prayer while an angel with a broadsword waits to behead him. That can’t be how it happened, not in that equestrian backyard in Jerusalem. Claudia uncaps the pen and draws a cross through James’s face.

She moves on, crosses out Thomas and then Philip, re-caps the pen and taps it against each of the images. Tap, tap, tap. She lets the pen rest on Thomas. In this picture a muscular infidel wearing a leather helmet is driving a spear into his chest. It’s all speculation.

‘We need to establish whether any of the connections are material. So far Thomas and Philip are linked as disciples of Jesus and as victims of violent crime. One was stoned and speared. Unusual. Philip, hundreds of miles away in Hierapolis, had a rope worked through his hamstrings. He was then hauled up on the rope, head down, feet in the air. He was left to hang and bleed until he died.’

Claudia lets them consider the fate of Philip, and the process of passing a rope through a chunk of living muscle. Gallio’s legs feel suddenly flimsy, insubstantial. He pushes his thighs into the edge of the chair and imagines the specialist tools, the necessary hardware. He’s in awe of the implacable will of whoever decided to sew a rope through the flesh of another human being.

‘Both disciples died curious and violent deaths,’ Claudia says. ‘Agreed? In that case, we have the beginning of a pattern.’

Hierapolis is the end city in an earthquake belt that stretches from south-west Turkey round the north-eastern Mediterranean as far as Israel. The coast is not rock solid here, never was or will be, and the planet can crack and shift seventy miles out to sea and six miles down. At Pamukkale, near Hierapolis, the earth’s core has thrown up terraces of travertine rock where hot springs deposit calcium carbonate that hardens into an impermeable crust. The whiteness of the mountainside pools turns the water a bright crystal blue.

The matching blue sky is scarred by vapour trails. An occasional seagull will drift left, drift right, looking for food or other seagulls to love. At the postcard stand, at the van selling Pepsi. Tourists without a guide probably won’t know that up the hill behind Pamukkale, beyond barefoot vacation snaps in the white-blue water, the ruined martyrium of Philip is waiting. Philip the one-time disciple of Jesus.

Claudia carried out her analysis and from that point onwards Cassius Gallio and Baruch were destined to start up this hill, the sun lunchtime high and the path at a serious angle. They will persevere, hands on knees as they struggle with the gradient, a challenging hike even in sensible shoes. They will overtake some stragglers and Gallio will recognise passengers from the coach tour. Who will soon overtake them back again, because unlike Gallio and Baruch they’ve trained on the rigours of the Camino.

‘What do we care if the disciples get killed?’ Baruch will stop to rest, doubled over, breathing heavily.

‘We don’t care. Not really.’ Gallio will also suffer, but he has recently returned from active duty. He will recover his breath more quickly. ‘The disciples are important because of what they tell us about Jesus. Three of them are dead. Something is happening, as if we’ve shaken their nest.’

Baruch will look up through the trees and groan.

‘We should have gone for Thomas before Paul,’ Gallio will say, ‘which I recommended. Then we might have learned something. If Jesus is with us, and if he can be found, we’ll trace him through his disciples. That’s my informed professional opinion.’

‘Not through Philip, though. Can’t wind up much more dead than Philip.’

‘No, but if they made a switch on the cross we’ll gradually get closer. Stands to reason. One of these disciples isn’t what he seems, and I have the feeling someone wants to stop us from closing in on Jesus.’