Then he pushed Gallio away, and with him everything Gallio stood for, the CCU, the legions, civilisation. With practised ease the knife found the sheath in the small of his back. ‘I’ll have answers,’ Baruch said. ‘If not here then from one of the others, and without your help.’ He made for the doorway, as if Jerusalem were full of disciples and he was in a hurry to find them, and to damage them. ‘I’ll deal with the disciples my way. You and your procedures are holding us back.’
Baruch slammed the door on his way out, making the liquids in the IV bags tremble.
‘It’s all right,’ Gallio said. He stood there with his fingers clamped to the cut above his eye. Blood found its way through to his knuckles, across the back of his hand as far as his wrist. ‘I won’t let anyone hurt you. I’m one of the good guys.’
Caistor is on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, away from nearby towns and significant transmitters, so the broadband is patchy at best. The town has under three thousand inhabitants, and the spire of the Church of St Peter and St Paul is a central feature, though in English market towns every building has history, or will have. The fire station on the hill is closed down or not yet operational. It’s difficult to find anyone to ask, because cold and late the market square is roadblocked by squad cars. Blue lights flash in the darkness, sliding across the slick black numbers on the white car roofs. A helicopter hammers above, searchlight strobing the narrow streets.
Cassius Gallio spits into the gutter, and his spit freezes on double yellow lines. A hostage situation. Not what he needs right now, but as likely in Caistor as anywhere else, as the big city, as an isolated farmhouse — wherever the human brain decides that action needs to be taken, that destinies can be changed by force.
In Caistor, criminal hubris requires the presence of emergency police from Hull, who have surrounded a large Georgian house just off the market square. To the side of the driveway are three lock-up garages, the far one subject to a breaking and entering. The two men inside the garage refuse to leave peacefully, hands in the air, as requested by a thirty-watt police loudhailer. The authorities will do the rest but the intruders are foreigners. They don’t understand a word anyone says.
Cassius Gallio of the Complex Casework Unit, specialising in sightings of disciples, arrives from over the sea. He has his ID with the embossed eagle. He has the face in its misery, and an overcoat and scarf and leather gloves for the wind that blows in from the Humber. He expects, and receives, a respectful welcome at the crime scene.
The press are in attendance with their lenses and recorders. They film Cassius Gallio shaking hands with the local police commissioner, and shout out for a comment. Gallio grips the commissioner by the elbow and guides him across to the safer side of the police line, nearer the criminals than the press. He shows him two pictures of Jesus from a selection on his phone, a Rubens and a Tissot. The local policeman shakes his head.
‘Similar, but that’s not the man.’
Gallio swipes through the disciple images and stops at Simon. He has a photo of the sculpture he once saw in Brussels, Simon in white marble leaning on a two-handled saw. The commissioner studies the face.
‘That’s him, that’s the hostage.’
‘And the kidnapper?’
‘We don’t have a description. He’s armed. He has a knife.’
Gallio updates Claudia — the disciple Simon is the hostage — and suggests she makes Bartholomew safe. ‘That’s why we brought him, after all. We can’t trust anyone else. Find him a room, somewhere warm. And don’t let him out of your sight.’
A kidnap negotiator offers Gallio the loudhailer. He waves it away. He phones Baruch’s number, and after a lengthy re-routing via Israel and back to England, the phone rings and Baruch answers. Gallio has to shout, because the background noise sounds like a sawmill.
‘What’s going on? Never mind. Stop whatever you’re doing. I’m coming in.’
The uniformed police are impressed. A WPC in a stab vest, crouching and keeping her eye on the corrugated door, accompanies Gallio to the third garage along. Cassius Gallio walks upright, wishing he’d brought a hat, holding the phone to his ear. ‘Open the door wide enough for me to get in.’
Camera flash whitens the winter gloom. Baruch leaves the door as low as possible so the press can’t get pictures, and Gallio drops to a press-up position and slides in underneath. They’ll get front-page shots of a Speculator in action, a special agent’s fearless first contact with the hostage-taker.
Cassius Gallio pulls the door closed behind him and stands up inside the garage. Christ. He kills the phone. He doesn’t want to see what he’s seeing but this is what has happened in Caistor. The event can’t be undone. Simon is naked and hanging from chains, head-down, the weight of his shoulders slumped on a workbench.
Gallio holds vomit into his mouth with his hand. Christ. Christ alive, this will make Jesus pay attention, surely it will. Every act of evil is an appeal. An atrocity is a provocation, always has been: gods, if you exist and have any shame then show yourselves. When they choose not to show themselves — and according to modern historians this is usually their choice — the horror has failed to shame them. More horror is needed. What about this atrocity, and this? What about this act of evil now? Jesus, what about this here now? Baruch has accepted the challenge.
He has chained each of Simon’s ankles, and hauled him up by a pulley attached to a steel roof beam. Simon’s legs are spread and in the air, his exposed white vertebrae curled into the bench. Baruch has taken an electric chainsaw and split Simon from the groin, starting in the hinge between his legs. How could Jesus not come back at the sight of this? If not now, then when? Come Jesus if you’re coming, come on. Baruch is sawing your disciple Simon in half.
Civilisation cannot tolerate acts like this. It sends for the police and civilisation is the police. Civilisation intervenes, says with divine certainty that this must never happen, though it does happen. Cassius Gallio defies Jesus to explain Simon, and what he thinks the torture of Simon means. None of the recorded parables illuminate a fate such as this in a provincial English garage.
The garage has a brushed concrete floor, and on hooks in the breeze-block wall tools are ordered according to size. The fourteen-inch electric chain saw is missing from its outline next to a cordless hammer drill. The saw is plugged into an orange-flexed extension socket and has been used to slice through Simon as far as his lower stomach. There is a gallon of blood on the concrete floor, like an engine block emptied of oil.
Cassius Gallio’s mind turns away, saving itself, just as his eyes know never to stare at the sun. He couldn’t chainsaw a man in half, he thinks, but Baruch can. Gallio is a negotiator, a finder of the best way forward. He feels the pressure of conscience, of knowing that Simon shouldn’t have to suffer like this, and conscience feels suddenly like the presence of Jesus. Does it? Cassius Gallio could probably shoot someone with a gun. He’s no saint.
He doesn’t have a gun.
Simon is alive. Gallio sees his fingers twitch.
‘Bastard might as well die.’ Baruch sweats heavily into his white shirt, jacket off, buttons undone even though the garage is cold. He is exhausted, deflated. ‘I couldn’t break him.’
Baruch has moved beyond reasonable decision-making. If anything, reason contributes to the problem because lies are a reasoned attempt to mislead. Pain is necessary to destroy Simon’s ability to reason, and therefore to lie, and Simon has certainly felt pain. He should have told the truth about Jesus by now. Before now. A long time before.