‘As you and your colleagues have just found out,’ said Tally with a slight shiver, ‘but it’s not as if the men in robes have large armies to call on.’
‘Think again, Tally, these people influence millions of others. For many, they are infallible, their word is law. Their followers will do as they are told.’
‘A scary thought.’
‘Scary is the word.’
Tally hesitated before changing the subject and asking, ‘Have you been to see Lucy Barrowman?’
Steven shook his head.
‘Don’t you think you should?’
‘I’ve thought about it... and decided against.’ Steven grimaced in discomfort before continuing, ‘However much I care about what has happened to her — and I do care — there is nothing I can do to help in any practical sense. I could take flowers and say how sorry I am, ask if there’s anything I can do, make all the right noises, but the truth is I was part of her whole nightmare, I was instrumental in starting the whole damn thing off. My continual turning up would remind her of that and stop it fading. I don’t want to interfere with the healing process. As for the latest attack, I find it beyond belief that anyone could be so unlucky and wouldn’t begin to know what to say.’
‘You really have thought about this, haven’t you,’ said Tally.
‘Do you have anything to say about it?’
‘I love you.’
Twenty-Four
‘Only in the UK,’ stormed John Macmillan.
Jean Roberts smiled sympathetically, ‘Is Something wrong, Sir John?’ she asked. ‘Anything I can do?’
‘The bugger’s on holiday.’
‘Which particular “bugger” are we talking about, sir,’ asked Jean, tongue in cheek.
Macmillan was overcome by embarrassment. ‘Sorry, Jean, the fellow who is supposed to be at the end of the PO box number trail is on holiday. Apparently, he has a bolt hole in Scotland.’ He uttered the words with distaste. ‘The stress of working for the bl... the Post Office seems to require a bolt hole and no one knows where it is.’
‘Who is working on it?’
‘The police, MI5, Special Branch, you name it. They’re combing the country.’
Jean had an image of horizontal lines of policemen carrying out a fingertip search of the Scottish Highlands and had to turn away.
‘It’s not funny, Jean,’ said Macmillan who had noticed anyway. ‘Have you seen Steven this morning?’
‘I think he was planning to see Neil Tyler, he’s been working on the identity of the Lindstrom funders too.’
‘The Home Secretary would like to see both of us this afternoon.’
‘I’ll make sure he knows.’
Steven and Tyler had arranged to meet in Green Park at Tyler’s request, but only if the weather permitted and it did. It wasn’t overly warm but the sky was clear with only a slight breeze bringing a chill to the air.
‘This was one of my wife’s favourite places,’ said Tyler ‘She always said she felt she was at the beating heart of England.’
‘It is nice,’ Steven agreed, ‘and next to all the levers of power.’
‘Everything that keeps the country running like a well-oiled seagull,’ said Tyler.
Steven was glad of the joke. He had feared that things might get a bit maudlin.
‘Any luck?’ he asked.
‘I figured my best chance of getting to the providers of Dorothy Lindstrom’s funding was through my legal eagle employers, Scarman and co. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one taking an interest in them, which was a bit of luck as it turned out. I recognised one of the investigators as a forensic accountant I met a few years ago when we were both on the trail of terrorist funding flowing into the Middle East.’
‘I’m hoping you’re not going to tell me that Islamic terrorists are funding Dorothy Lindstrom,’ said Steven.
‘Far from it,’ Tyler replied. ‘Marco was looking for money haemorrhaging from the Vatican.’
Steven looked at him as if he couldn’t believe his ears but desperately wanted to. ‘I think this is where I shout bingo and jump up in the air,’ he said.
‘Glad that makes someone happy,’ said Tyler, waiting for an explanation.
‘No, go on,’ said Steven.
‘Apparently there’s a bit of a rift going on in the Vatican at the moment. A number of cardinals are being less than respectful to his holiness because they don’t like the way the church is moving. They would prefer to see a return to a more traditional approach as opposed to what they see as leftist-leaning anathema.’
‘Ah, the poor are all very well, but let’s keep them in their place.’
‘Quite. Money has been going walkabout and the fear is that it’s being used to fund the ambitions of the rebel cardinals.’
‘Wonderful,’ said Steven. ‘He told Tyler all about Father Liam Crossan and Fidei Defensores.’
‘Maybe I’ll join you in a jump up and down,’ said Tyler.
They exchanged a high five.
‘First time I’ve done one of these,’ said Steven.
‘Me too.’
‘Well, I think we can agree, Vatican money is funding Dorothy Lindstrom’s research,’ said Steven. ‘officially or unofficially and, in our case, we know why.’
‘That just leaves Barrowman’s secret to uncover.’
‘And we’re getting closer.’
Steven got Jean’s text as he left Green Park. He acknowledged it and saw that he had plenty time to grab something to eat at The Moorings before heading back to the Home Office. It had just gone noon and that meant that there would still be room at the outside tables to sit and watch the river for a while. He felt good, Neil and Jean between them had come up with the evidence that the Vatican was involved and the fact that it was through the actions of an unsanctioned group rather than the real deal was the icing on the cake. It was going to make it so much easier (for others!) to deal with and probably put an end to without undue repercussion. It would be in everyone’s interest to cover it all up.
There would of course be problems for Dorothy Lindstrom when her funding suddenly stopped, but letting it be known to Dorothy that it had been the British intelligence services who had stopped her being financed through conventional government sources should provide her with enough ammunition to turn such funding right back on again. Life was looking much better.
Steven had just asked John Macmillan what the meeting was going to be about when Macmillan’s phone rang. When he’d finished taking the call he turned to Steven and said, ‘They’ve found Mr Simon Stratford.’
‘Good... who’s he?’
‘Sorry, he’s the missing link in the PO box number saga. They found him in a cottage on the Moray Firth coast in the north east of Scotland... or at least that’s where he was. He’s now on his way to Lossiemouth where the RAF are going to bring him back to London. I hope he had a light lunch.’
‘Couldn’t he just have given us the information we need?’
‘Seemingly not, there’s procedure, he insists he should be there.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Steven, wondering how long it might take the UK to launch a Cruise missile and then thinking that might be a good thing anyway.
Steven suspected that the Home Secretary had called the meeting in response to what Macmillan had already told her about the possible murder of Dorothy’s two post-docs in the US and what possible dangers lay here. He was not wrong. She had invited along two senior intelligence officers, a shadow cabinet minister and a number of church leaders to discuss the “current situation with particular regard to epigenetic research”.