Her father’s face, square-jawed and bristle-chinned, smiled down at her, his basso voice rumbled at her that it was time for bed, and she was taken away from the pencils and the almost-complete, almost-incarnate lion to be tucked up in white sheets in another room. Probably, being a child’s bedroom, it contained things and colours and textures, but in Diema’s memory it was white like the sheets, empty like her grieving hands.
Despite the vagueness of the memory, she knew this beyond any possibility of a doubt: she never held the pencils again; the drawing was never completed. That trivial, wonderful thing had been stolen from her.
The father of her flesh was synonymous with loss, even then.
She kept her eyes fixed on the open doors of the hayloft, where nothing moved. She waited for them to call her. And for the lion to be delivered at last.
45
‘Ben Rush, this is Leo Tillman. Tillman, Rush,’ Kennedy said.
She turned the photocopied sheets so that they faced the two men.
‘If we’re going to do this,’ she said, ‘I think we should start with Toller’s book. Alex Wales came to Ryegate House to steal this, and then stayed to get a list of everyone who’d read it, going back about sixty or seventy years. The ones that were still alive aren’t alive any more.’
Kennedy was standing, both men were sitting — side by side on the same side of the table, facing her. Tillman pulled out the sheaf of paper from the bundle in front of him and read aloud, with Rush peering over his shoulder. ‘And the False word wille die, and the True worde live. As on the threshing Floor, when Chaff is sorted from Wheat, that all who worke dilligently and earn their Hire may finally eat …’ Tillman looked up at Kennedy. ‘Any chance of a summary?’
‘It’s pretty much all like this,’ she said. ‘Three hundred and seventy two prophecies over sixty or seventy pages — all the signs and wonders that come right before the end of the world.’
‘Like in the Book of Revelations,’ Rush said.
‘Thank you, Rush. I knew I could rely on a good Catholic boy like you to make that connection.’ Still chafing under the weight of his earlier humiliations, Rush blushed, and glanced at Kennedy sharply to see if this was sarcasm. ‘Exactly like the Book of Revelations,’ she confirmed. ‘Except that Toller goes into a lot more detail. Look at a few of the prophecies at random, you’ll see what I mean.’
Tillman turned the pages and he and Rush both read for a while in silence.
‘Why is the book significant?’ Tillman asked at last. ‘To the Judas People, I mean? Why do they care who reads this? It’s not their scripture, is it?’
‘Yeah, I think it is,’ Kennedy said.
There was a silence while Tillman absorbed this. ‘But we read their scripture,’ he said. ‘You did, anyway. It was much, much older than this nonsense — first- or second-century. And it was about the bargain Jesus made with Judas.’
‘Which was what, again?’ Rush asked.
‘Judas helped Jesus to die,’ Kennedy said wearily. ‘In return, God gave Judas and his kindred the earth. But they would have to wait three thousand years to inherit. Thirty pieces of silver — standing for thirty centuries.’
‘So where does this come in?’ Tillman asked, jerking his head at Toller’s book.
‘I think Toller was one of the Judas People,’ Kennedy said. ‘I think he came out of their hidden city into the world and started or joined a cult called the Fifth Monarchists. They preached an apocalyptic version of Christianity. They were waiting for the fifth and last empire — Christ’s — to start, which would bring about the end of history, the end of earthly kings and dominions, the end of the world as we know it.’
‘Wait,’ Rush said. ‘Is this what all the Judas People think or just Toller?’
‘They all think it’s going to happen,’ she said. ‘But Toller thought it was going to happen right then, at the end of the seventeenth century. And he went out and spread the word among the heathens, which really isn’t the Judas tribe’s MO at all.’
‘So Toller was what, a kind of Judas People heretic?’
‘Good a word as any,’ Kennedy said. ‘But what matters for us is that he appears out of nowhere in the middle of the seventeenth century and starts to preach and write …’
‘After an accident,’ Rush said.
Kennedy and Tillman both looked at him.
Rush seemed a little uncomfortable with the attention, but he went on. ‘Toller fell down a ravine in the Swiss Alps. Then an angel started talking to him about the time to come. It was after he came back to England that he started prophesying.’
‘Some sort of near-death experience,’ Tillman mused dourly. ‘You could see where that might change the course of his life. Make him feel like there was something else he needed to be doing.’
‘Is there anything else we know about him?’ Kennedy asked Rush.
Rush shrugged. ‘We know when he died. And we know that he had this weird way of doing the sign of the cross that was more like he was rubbing his stomach.’
‘The noose,’ Kennedy said. ‘The Judas People use the sign of the noose the same way Christians use the sign of the cross. It means the same thing to them. Because some of the early accounts of Judas’s life have him dying by hanging.’
‘It’s circumstantial evidence,’ Tillman said.
‘But Toller also talks about three thousand years being given to the four kingdoms of Man before Christ returns. It’s a close match to the Judas tribe’s belief that they get to inherit the world after the children of Adam rule it — for three millennia. Okay, Leo, you asked why Toller’s book matters. Why it matters now, to us and to the Judas People. And here’s where we get to it. Look at the prophecies on the first page of Toller’s book.’
This time it was Rush who read — flatly, without expression. ‘“The Infidels who soile the Holy Worde will bewaile their Blindness, and repent. Even in the House of the faithlesse Soldier they will repent. And in Münsters Churche, so, and likewise, they will repent. But such repentance wille come too late and Helles Fires will take holde on them.”’
‘The faithless soldier is Thomas Fairfax,’ Kennedy said. ‘One of the generals in the English Civil War. He was sympathetic towards Toller’s Fifth Monarchists for a while, but then he dropped them. From their point of view, betrayed them.’
‘Still sounds like ancient history,’ Tillman said dryly.
‘Doesn’t it?’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But a few weeks ago, Fairfax’s old country seat, Nunappleton Hall, was burned to the ground. Hell’s fires, if you want to be melodramatic, in the house of the faithless soldier.
‘And Münster’s church went the same way. Toller meant a specific church — the Überwasserkirche, which was the site of a famous uprising. The day after the fire at Nunappleton, someone planted and detonated a bomb in the Überwasserkirche. Again, a firebomb.’
Both men were staring at her in grim, perturbed silence, trying to figure out what this could mean. But they hadn’t heard anything yet, and Kennedy couldn’t spare their feelings.
‘With me so far? Okay, look at prophecy number two. “Gods Angel will stand over Zion with a flaming Sworde outstretched in his hand, ready to doe Execution.” One of God’s angels was called Azrael — I think he might have been the angel of death, but don’t quote me on that. When I got home four nights ago, I turned on the TV and heard about an incident where an Azrael ground-to-air missile was fired over Jerusalem. The Israeli government blamed it on an accident. It exploded in mid-air, thank God — no deaths, this time. But the prophecy goes on to say that the angel won’t strike with his sword because it isn’t the time yet.’