The Sixth Soul (7 page)

‘There was a time,’ said Sebastian, ‘when you had to get into the British Library to see anything like this. Have you been to the British Library, Aidan?’

‘I’ve never been, Sebastian.’

‘OK! We’re in business.’ Rosen ran his index finger over the mouse pad as Aidan placed two mugs of coffee on the plain wooden table on which sat the laptop.

‘Thanks, Aidan.’ Sebastian moved the cups to a safe distance from Rosen’s laptop and asked, ‘Not joining us?’

Aidan raised a glass of water to his lips and shook his head.

‘Type the name of the person in the box,’ said Rosen, an unconfident speller.

With one finger, Sebastian typed the words
Alessio Capaneus
and asked, ‘What now?’

Rosen rolled the cursor onto the search button and clicked. Just 0.73 seconds later 1,400,000 matches had been found.

‘Wow!’ A sigh of heartfelt wonder escaped Sebastian.

‘Don’t get too excited. They aren’t all actually about the man we’re investigating.’

Rosen scrolled down the first page and, after the sixth reference, direct references to Alessio Capaneus went cold. He skipped to page two and found a reference that replicated one from the
first page. Page three, nothing. Four, five, six, seven, blank. Nothing.

He came back to the first page.

‘You’re going too fast for me,’ said Sebastian.

‘You were right. He is obscure.’

Of the six sites found, three were one and the same. The fourth and fifth site contained a one-line reference to ‘Alessio Capaneus, thirteenth-century witch’.

‘But he wasn’t a witch,’ said Sebastian.

‘Which gives you a clue as to how reliable information on the internet can be.’

‘You mean there’s no editorial control on the internet?’ Sebastian sounded astonished.

Rosen didn’t know what to say, or where to begin explaining, so he just said, ‘That’s correct, Father Sebastian. There is no editorial control on the internet. It would be like
trying to create order in grains of desert sand when a windstorm was raging. Didn’t you use the internet when you were at the Vatican?’

‘Grains of sand?’ replied the priest. The sixth site merely listed Alessio Capaneus among other known Florentines of the period. ‘The internet was just about coming in when I
left Rome for Kenya.’

‘What were you doing in Kenya?’ asked Rosen.

‘The Lord’s work. What about these three at the top?’ asked Sebastian.

‘It’s . . . the same three.’ Rosen clicked onto the top site. ‘It’s a directory of the occult. Look.’ He scrolled so that the single paragraph referring to
Alessio Capaneus was visible on screen.

‘Tshhh!’ The sound escaped from Rosen’s lips, steam from the valves of his heart. ‘Brilliant. Punish a paedophile by making him take in a vulnerable child.’

‘You have a child, David?’ asked the priest.

Rosen looked at the priest and then back at the laptop screen.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘No, no . . .’

‘I thought you were going to say, “Yes” and then you said “No” . . . three times.’

Rosen tapped the screen and began reading aloud,
‘
Alessio began having religious visions, which became more and more disturbing, evoking violent reactions from the
teenager.’ The almost invisible footprint of someone from the depths of history started mattering to him
.
The boy who was Alessio Capaneus was no doubt driven mad by the attentions
of a sexually perverted stepfather. He continued to read:

‘That’s why I asked Aidan to contact you. That’s why I told you he’d take another woman after he’d destroyed Julia Caton and her child.’

‘What else do you know about Capaneus?’ Rosen tried to hide the hunger in his voice.

‘ To be honest, I’ve learned a great deal simply from looking at this account on the internet. This is positively encyclopaedic. I didn’t know he was a street child, I assumed
he was a blood member of the Capaneus family. His name and his crime and the time and place he lived in: that’s the sum of my knowledge.’

‘There must be other information about him out there.’

‘I haven’t seen anything other than two references in articles about the Florentine legal system.’

‘Can you recall what the references to Capaneus stated?’ asked Rosen, without much hope.

‘Something about a book he’s alleged to have written, or a pamphlet.’

‘What’s the book called, Father Sebastian?’

‘It’s speculation, hearsay from the trial.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think such a book exists.’

‘No one’s going to copycat on such meagre pickings. There’s got to be more meat on the bone to inspire a copycat.’ Rosen moved up a gear.

‘Then it’s down to you to find it, Detective Rosen. The meat and the bone.’

Outside, a blackbird gave up her song and an ascending plane made the sky moan.

‘If you don’t mind me asking, Father Sebastian, how did you get to be a papal adviser on the occult?’

‘I gained a PhD in Anthropolgy from Cambridge. My thesis, “Beyond
The Golden Bough
”, required me to research magic and ritual.’

That’s how
, thought Rosen, with the ache of a boy who’d never quite caught up in class.

‘Is there anything else you’d like to add, Father Sebastian?’

Sebastian shook his head. Across the length of the kitchen, Rosen read the crease in Aidan’s brow.

‘Nothing at all?’ Rosen pushed the priest but looked directly at Aidan.

‘I’ve told you everything I know.’ A flicker of thought made the priest’s expression quizzical.

‘What is it, Father?’ asked Rosen.

‘Can you look up anyone on the internet?’

‘Just Google the name. Want me to do you?’

The priest laughed and looked at Brother Aidan, who said, ‘Why not?’

Rosen typed in ‘Father Sebastian’ and within a second an ocean of matches came up but none, it seemed, immediately to match Father + Sebastian + Flint. He scrolled. Nothing. He
turned to page two. In the middle, a page of obituaries for Roman Catholic priests. The priest’s name was there.

Rosen opened the site and scrolled through the brief nutshells of the lives of dead priests.

‘Well, it can’t be you, obviously,’ said Rosen. ‘There are other people who share the same name, of course.’

‘Let me see . . .’ said the priest. He read out, ‘Father Sebastian, born Bolton, England, 1969, missionary to Kenya, died near Lake Victoria in a road traffic accident,
1998.’

Rosen watched the priest closely.

He looked back at the police officer.

‘You can’t believe everything you see on the internet, I guess,’ said Father Sebastian.

From Rosen’s laptop, two loud sudden notes. Aidan dropped his glass, shards scattering across the stone floor, water spreading across the smooth surface. Sebastian didn’t seem to
notice the accident, his attention fixed on the laptop.

‘What was that?’ Sebastian asked, then added, ‘Here, Aidan, let me help you.’

‘I’ve got an email,’ Rosen replied, but Sebastian was busy on his hands and knees, picking up pieces of jagged glass.

Rosen opened it.

Rosen thanked the priests for their time and apologized for the suddenness of his departure.

‘God bless you, David Rosen!’ Father Sebastian’s voice followed Rosen as he swept out of the kitchen.

Aidan turned to Sebastian.

‘You said you’d tell me why you wanted to speak to the police officer.’

‘Detective Rosen’s arrival reminded me of something. Of what the world does and doesn’t do, Aidan. It just doesn’t do faith. You saw the way he looked when he was
searching out that information about Capaneus. He was humouring me, almost as if I’d committed an act of indecent exposure of the spirit. I wanted to help, that was all. But the world
doesn’t believe in what it cannot see, own, eat or fornicate with. You know that. I know that.’

Father Sebastian fell silent. Brother Aidan drew breath to speak but said nothing as the priest held up his index finger.

‘Aidan, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to rack my brain, and I’m going to pray for inspiration, and I’m going to sit in quiet contemplation of
what those poor women and children have suffered and what their families are suffering. Is that good enough for you?’

Sebastian stood up and dropped broken glass into the bin. He spread his fingers and stared into the lines on his hands.

‘You always try to make me feel that I’m not quite good enough,’ said the priest. Something faceless, yet with a strong pulse, raced along Aidan’s spine.

‘You think essentially that I’m a bad man, Aidan; you think I’m a bad man and a bad priest, don’t you?’

He moved to the door.

‘Sebastian, please—’

‘I’m glad, Brother Aidan,’ said Sebastian, without turning, ‘that you haven’t lived through my life, my suffering. That’s all.’

As Father Sebastian walked out, Brother Aidan stooped to pick up the finer shards of glass from the cold stone floor.

——

S
IX MISSED MESSAGES
. All from Carol Bellwood. Rosen returned the call as he turned on the ignition.

‘Hello, David, where are you?’ She was outdoors and in a hurry.

‘St Mark’s, Faversham, Kent.’

‘You’ve got to get back here.’

‘I got your email . . . what’s the development?’

‘The old lady from 24 Brantwood Road. The pathologist says—’

‘Which pathologist?’

‘Dr Sweeney.’

She said something else but the line wasn’t good and her voice broke up. ‘I missed that, Carol. Again?’

‘The old lady was murdered. Eighteen months ago.’

I
n life, the old lady at 24 Brantwood Road had the name Isobel Swift. In the fluorescent glare of the mortuary, there was something birdlike about
her skeleton, a lightness and vulnerability that reminded Rosen – if a reminder was needed – how fragile life was.

Dr Sweeney hummed an improvised melody and rinsed his hands under the tap, the sound of running water reminding Rosen of Father Sebastian and his impoverished room. But instead of aromatic
incense and the undertone of sweat, the mortuary smelled of chemical cold and the ultimate transience of the flesh.

Sweeney snapped on his gloves, his fingers, much travelled into the dark spaces of the human body, flexing in the harsh overhead light. Of all the rooms and places Rosen had had to enter in his
capacity as a detective, the mortuary was the one he always wanted to be out of fastest.

‘Detective Rosen.’

Rosen raised his eyes from Isobel Swift to meet Sweeney’s.

‘Cadavers can’t bite.’ Sweeney may have sounded happy, but his face was frozen behind an impassive mask. ‘She died of asphyxiation and the person who killed her knew what
he was doing. I wouldn’t even rule out an advanced knowledge of medicine or the human body. There are five separate and deliberate blows to the ribcage. The five ribs have penetrated inwards,
two to the left, three to the right. Within her chest, blood had flooded both lungs. Look at the top ribs: they’re short and chunky and hardly ever break. He’s picked the middle ribs,
dainty and long. Why? Because it takes a long time to die of a haemothorax. If you were speculating about her death, she drowned in the thin air around her, so to speak, her own blood filling up
her lungs from within.’

Rosen considered. In a bungled burglary, he’d once seen an old lady’s ribcage smashed in a panic of blows. But the breaks before his eyes were precise and had a sinister
symmetry.

‘Sadistic,’ whispered Rosen. ‘Only five broken ribs, so it took the longest possible time to die. This man wanted to observe.’ He stopped thinking aloud when he saw the
smile in Sweeney’s eyes evolve into a smirk.

‘What is it, Dr Sweeney?’

‘Why do you insist on tormenting yourself over the victims?’

Rosen was lost for words. Bellwood stepped closer to the slab. She said ‘Whoever did this wanted to savour and enjoy it.’

Sweeney’s forehead shone in the overhead light of the windowless room.

A string of possibilities occurred to Rosen, which he kept to himself.

The person who killed Mrs Swift, eighteen months ago, is Herod. Herod doesn’t appear to know his more recent victims, but I’d bet my last pound he knew Mrs Swift. What’s
the link here? How do the pieces connect?

‘Anything else to add, Dr Sweeney?’

‘Do you mean, was there any sexual interference, Detective Rosen?’

Rosen wished hard for a ‘no’.

‘It’s hard to tell from a skeleton but I’ve had an initial report from the forensics lab and there was no semen on her bedsheets and nothing alien came out of the pubic
comb-through.’ Sweeney spoke to Rosen as if he was a child, and a rather stupid one at that.

‘Let’s go, Carol.’

Although grateful for Sweeney’s information, Rosen resisted the urge to thank him or even say farewell to a man who thought compassion was a sign of weakness.

——

‘Y
OU THINK THERE
’
S
a link between Mrs Swift’s murder and the murder of our pregnant mothers?’ he asked Bellwood.