‘He talked, but came out with the same old stuff. Jesus walking on water, and making blind men see. Jesus back from the dead, Jesus to come again.’
‘Baruch, what are you doing? What have you done here?’
Baruch starts crying, sobbing up huge gulps of grief. Gallio risks a glance at Simon. There, again, a flicker of movement right at the end of a fingertip.
‘I wanted to call Jesus out.’ Tears run down Baruch’s face, both cheeks, the corner of his mouth. ‘Paul managed it, so why can’t I? How can Jesus put up with this? He should be here, but he knows I won’t roll over like Paul. I could take him. I know I could, because he’s a coward. If he had anything about him I wouldn’t get away with this.’
And then he has no sobbing left inside him. He wipes his eyes, and anger returns as a reliable emotion, the one he knows and uses best. Anger rises and revives him, and with a new sense of purpose he puts down the saw. One more time he wipes the back of his hand over his eyes. He pulls out his knife.
‘Put down the knife, Baruch.’
Cassius Gallio is unarmed. He feels colossally stupid and arrogant for shutting the door of the garage. Baruch sniffs back the last of his tears then points the knife at Gallio’s throat, like an essential step in his reasoning.
‘I’ve been killing Simon for hours, trying to taunt Jesus out of hiding. I was expecting him to appear to me.’
‘Obviously it doesn’t work like that. Your analysis is flawed.’
‘I know how Jesus works.’
‘Do you? I thought Simon didn’t talk.’
‘Didn’t need to. He betrayed himself in the way he acted. The torture was necessary to find that out, but now I know their secret.’
Gallio is distracted by Simon’s fingers, watching them until they’re no longer closing, however faintly, as a sign that his brain is reaching for grains of life. Simon is breathing, hearing. Something outside himself is understood, and then it is not. His fingers are still. The soul goes out of Simon, and Cassius Gallio waits for a profound insight or thought. None comes.
The seventh disciple is dead, but Jesus stays away. He does not have a human heart.
‘Let me tell you what I did with the bones of James,’ Baruch says. ‘This is important. Not the last James, but the one they beat to death. The first James, the disciple my men beheaded in Jerusalem. I was pleased they did it. Didn’t bother me in the slightest, but I felt we had a point to prove with the body. I wasn’t going to risk a second Jesus, or Lazarus, so James had to stay dead. I boiled his corpse in a horse cauldron. Left it in there for hours, until the meat floated off. Beige in colour, I remember, like boiled pork. I chucked the meat to a dog. Other dogs turned up and fought for the scraps, no manners at all. I emptied the soup of James from the cauldron, watched it soak into the dried earth. The bones I collected into a sack, wrapped it in duct tape, and I personally signed off the package with UPS to Spain. It was the furthest place I could think of. James the disciple of Jesus was dead and he would not be coming back. That’s what I thought: this time when they die they’re dead.’
‘James gets visitors.’
‘I know. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, trekking miles to touch his bones. They talked about it on the coach to Pamukkale, and this is the secret the disciples want to keep from us. Whatever we do, they’ve planned ahead. Every decision we make works in their favour, if only we could see into the future. We were wrong about Philip and Thomas, they didn’t have to recognise their killer. The disciples don’t fight back because they’re happy to die. That explains why they don’t run, because the future is secure. Death is irrelevant to them. They have an insight into life after death that we need to take seriously.’
Baruch’s eyes are alight with a brightness Gallio fears: shimmering, brittle, sick.
‘Baruch, the British police are outside this garage in numbers. They’re not unreasonable people, and they’ll look after you. Give yourself up.’
‘Simon knew where he was going, and he wanted to get there. He suffered, but without the level of suffering I expected him to show. He had an absolute certainty about what was going to happen next.’
‘Jealous?’
The word slips out before Cassius Gallio can stop himself, a thought so evident that to think it is to say it. Baruch isn’t angry, he’s jealous, this is the most reliable of his emotions. He is the expert on death, but the disciples have information about the afterlife that he does not.
‘I am jealous, yes. I want to know where they go, and why it doesn’t scare them.’
Baruch places his killer’s knife in the looseness of his left hand. He fixes Gallio eye-to-eye and blows into the palm of his right, flexing then clenching his fingers.
‘Tell it to the police,’ Gallio says. ‘Don’t do anything you’ll regret.’
‘I know what I’m doing. Have a little faith.’
He rolls his shoulders, preparing himself. Tosses the knife back into his right hand, grips hard. Baruch stabs himself deep in the windpipe.
VIII: BARTHOLOMEW skinned alive
SHIT. THIS KIND of mess won’t clean up itself.
The next morning Gallio keeps Claudia involved, and that line in her forehead will not be softening any time soon. Her coping mechanisms involve pointing and tutting and snapping at Caistor locals who are too quick, too slow, too clumsy. Is it really so difficult, her body language asks, to get a pair of bodies bagged for air freight to Israel?
The heavy lifting they leave to John W. Varlow and his son, undertakers from Chapel Street, while Gallio feeds a diversionary story to the press about foreign gangs and ancient grudges and the chronic use of Humberside Airport by drug mules. He mentions Albania. The ladies and gentlemen of the press suck their teeth. Naturally, Albania. Cassius Gallio provides a prime-time story they recognise, along with its familiar ending. The kidnapper killed the hostage then turned his weapon on himself. That will be all, thank you.
For the people of Caistor, from that night onwards, the horror is safe in the past. The murder of Simon was a freak event, however sickening, but no one need think too deeply about what has happened here, not far from the market square. The case of the sawn-in-half disciple becomes a curiosity for out-of-towners, and a leaflet is available in the Heritage Centre.
Gallio has a report to write for Valeria, to close off the episode, but for him the incident lives on. He supervises the police as they decontaminate the crime scene, and reassures the commissioner that no other disciples of Jesus are expected to visit the region. The police commissioner glances at an upstairs window, above the long blue sign for White Hart Freehouse and Accommodation. Bartholomew is occasionally seen in silhouette, and he’s always conspicuous at the post office.
‘Except him,’ Claudia says. ‘But he’s harmless. He’s helping us with our enquiries, and we’ll take him with us when we go.’
They stay in Caistor. Speculators aren’t machines, despite their best efforts, and temporarily, while the double killing seems random and senseless, Gallio loses the urge to look for Jesus. He misses Baruch. He didn’t think he would, but he does. Baruch has been a part of his life as far back as Lazarus, and Gallio grieves for another story lost that connects the past to the present.
Keep it together, he tells himself, but his ambitions feel compromised by so much death and so little Jesus. He remembers Thomas on the morgue trolley in Babylon, Philip swinging from his thighs in Hierapolis, and now in Caistor Simon with legs splayed sawn almost in half. These murders are unforgettable, deliberately so, but what kind of death does Jesus need to see before objecting? What has to happen before he intervenes and makes his presence felt?