‘Mnnggg.’
The girl was whimpering, choking a little on her gag. Rothley leaned close, and assessed her half-naked body. She was quite dirty. He would have to bathe her and feed her tonight. Yes. Then put some ointment on her wrists where the ropes had grazed her skin, and dress her in clean white clothes. He had to get her right for the final ritual, for the great and dramatic denouement, when she could burn correctly in the ‘incandescent fires’.
Staring out of the window, at the grey terraced houses of Plymouth, Rothley rolled the resonant Coptic concepts in his mind.
Burn the virgin in the scorching and incandescent fires of Hell. Before the eyes of many.
How fitting. It was rather magnificent in its own way. He had to burn the girl, and do it all in public. The writers of the Abra-Melin ritual had a gift for poetry, and theatre, as well as pre-Christian sorcery.
‘Mmmggnnn!’
The girl was still mumbling, intruding on his thoughts. What did she want? Perhaps she was thirsty? He couldn’t risk her dehydrating. He wanted her alive so that she could die. Pulling the rag from out of her mouth, he said, ‘Yes? What is it?’
‘Please … please …’ The tears streamed abundantly down her bruised face. ‘Please let me go. Please!’
She was sobbing. It was cruel. He sighed and shook his head. ‘No.’
‘I … I …’ Zara sobbed some more, her lips trembling with fear, her eyelids opening and closing as if she were drugged. Soon she would be drugged. He would have to give her the last incense so that she was entirely bewitched; and of course he would inject some Ampulex compressa. Then she would walk into the incandescent flames virtually of her own volition. Her pure, virginal, eight-year-old’s body would be taken by the sub-princes, and scorched and devoured. Wholly consumed, rolled in the mouth of Helclass="underline" a cruel and beautiful death, witnessed by many.
And so the great and noble ritual of Abra-Melin would be consummated, properly and authentically, for maybe the first time in centuries. And Rothley would be inviolable.
He exulted as he stuffed the grey dishrag in the girl’s tender red mouth, silencing her pathetic whimpers. He had done it. He was enacting and completing the great ritual, he had done something Crowley couldn’t, something no one had done for a very long time.
Maybe he should tell the girl why she was going to die? Perhaps she deserved to know her role.
Leaning close to her little white ear, Rothley told her in a gentle whisper how tomorrow morning she was going to be taken to a special public place, and burned alive.
Zara Parkinson wept.
49
‘Christ,’ said DS Curtis, staring out of the window at the whitened landscape. ‘It’s like the moon.’
Karen replied tersely. ‘This is a profitable industry. Brings jobs to Cornwall.’
‘But all this white shit — on the roads and the cars.’
DI Sally Pascoe spoke up, from the back seat. ‘It’s China clay, kaolin, it gets everywhere, even inside the houses, people inhale it — but it’s safe.’
Karen let Sally talk on; her mind was very much distracted.
Where was the girl? Zara Parkinson? So far they had made zero progress. They had finally exhausted the entire list of Crowley residences, extant and demolished, fictional and alleged — and found nothing. So their only route to the girl was tracing Rothley; and Rothley was after Herzog.
Which meant Rothley might just come here. To the laboratory in Rescorla. To find Herzog at home.
Karen got out of the car, put her binoculars to her eyes, and gazed down into the white-and-green valley. Either side of the great scoop of the dale were some of the biggest mountains of kaolin spoil in the clay district. At the far end of the valley was a lurid turquoise-green lake: coloured thus by minerals leaching into the groundwater.
This part of the kaolin district had been worked out decades ago. The English China Clay Company were already beginning the process of grassing over the mighty white Himalayas of kaolin tailings. Nonetheless the place still looked moonlike, as Curtis had said, or maybe like a landscape on a different, nastier planet: remote, swept by cold winds, bitterly sterile.
‘So that’s it,’ said Sally.
‘Sorry?’
‘So that building there, that’s Herzog’s lab.’
‘Yep. He has several properties all over the UK. But this place is a laboratory where he does research on stem-cell technology, or so he says.’
‘Why here?’
‘Cornwall is EU Objective One,’ Karen said. ‘High-tech start-ups get subsidies.’
‘He doesn’t need the money?’
‘But he wants it. Billionaires love money.’
Karen lifted her binoculars again. The laboratory was situated bang in the middle of the vast disused claypit: a jumble of modern one-storey buildings. Steel containers stood outside them. Some cars were parked on the surrounding tarmac.
‘It makes sense. The clayzone is remote. No one comes here, yet you’re just ten minutes’ drive from the A30. An hour from the motorway. And just twenty minutes from Newquay Airport. You can leave here after breakfast and be in London for coffee at eleven. Yet here you are, hidden away on the moon.’
‘Maybe it is just a stem-cell lab.’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Karen. ‘Yet maybe it isn’t. He’s not going to ask Kerrier Council if he can build a lab to manufacture mind-bending parasites, is he?’
Sally shuddered. ‘What if …’ She gazed down at the apparently innocent buildings. ‘What if he is doing all that shit down there? I mean, imagine, imagine … the horrible stuff.’
‘Karen!’
It was a shout from DS Curtis. Karen ran back to the car, and leaned in. Her hopes rose: had they found Zara?
Her detective sergeant was holding up the radio receiver. ‘Herzog crossed into UK air space thirty minutes ago, seeking permission to land at Newquay. He’s coming here, DCI. He’ll be here in less than two hours.’
Karen got back in the car and shut the door. So, if Herzog was coming it was very likely Rothley would show up, too.
Frowning, and thinking, she said, ‘Let’s wait and try to catch him doing what he does. Pull back a few yards. Make sure we’re totally invisible.’ She thought some more. ‘Sally, call the armed-response team again — at St Austell. And the hazardous chemical people. Get everyone. Get them up here.’
‘Why?’
‘Rothley. I just have a hunch. Rothley.’
50
‘It’s just forty minutes,’ Herzog explained, as they descended the wheeled steps and walked towards a big, black, newish SUV, waiting in the desolate car park of Newquay Airport. Ryan stumbled, Helen assisted him.
Ryan measured his sight, looking into the distance: the sea was visible over the green damp fields, a mile north. A pale January sun was failing to warm the freezing wind. But there was a darkness on the horizon, like an eclipse, and it wasn’t bad weather.
Five hours’ flying had brought them from sunburned desert to wintry western England. For most of it he had been delirious, stretched out on an extended seat, praying and sweating. Dying, like Albert.
Now one of those rarer hours of lucidity had returned. But the blindness was definitely worse. It was as if he was gazing through shrinking binoculars: the rings of darkness had tightened and soon he would be totally blind. In an hour or two he would be dead.