Stafford gave a gasp. ‘What are you saying? That Superintendent Maloney is in on something, maybe trying to cover something up? Look, I hate the guy’s guts, but do you know what you’re suggesting here?’
‘You have to keep this quiet, Stafford. Let him have his head. Go along with things. ‘Lives depend on it. Many, many lives. So as far as today is concerned, we never had this conversation, understand?’
He pushed fingers through his hair, shaking his head. ‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘Things are never simple. Where do we go from here?’
‘The Polish guy back at the station, he’s no guiltier of murdering that woman than you or I. But I’ve seen this before; if they want him guilty they’ll find him guilty. Whatever they want to stick will stick. That man Rayne, the third member of the Lunar Club, he knows more than he’s letting on. I’ve got people looking into him. Soon there won’t be anything he can hide from me.’
‘But Maloney — are you saying he’s with this CEB?’
‘Many people are with CEB. You just don’t know who, which is why from now on you have to be real careful. So you’ve got to let it go, leave it to me. You understand, Stafford?’
He eyed him. Hit the play button and Bon Jovi’s rock guitar chords growled aggressively. ‘Cut the Stafford, Styles; it’s sir to you!’
36
On closer examination she was older than he thought. She looked mid-thirties maybe. The beginnings of lines spreading out from her eyes. Tired eyes, Gareth thought. Deeply troubled.
‘So who are you really working for?’ said Gareth. ‘Who is Caroline Cody?’
She screwed her nose up slightly. ‘I told you, I work for Pipistrelle.’
‘Oh yeah, the bat,’ he sneered. ‘Come on, where’d you learn all this gun stuff?’
‘The hard way. I served in Afghanistan.’
‘That tells me something but not a lot. You with the military now?’
‘No, and that’s all I’m going to tell you on the subject. I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘That’s not good enough.’
‘Well tough titty!’ she snapped. Then shook her head, leaning back against the worktop with her arms folded. ‘Sit down, Gareth.’ She waited till he gave in to her stare and sat down. ‘First, you have got to believe me when I tell you to trust me, no matter what happens. You got that?’
‘Seems everyone wants me to do that. What choice do I have?’
‘Secondly, I know where your sister is.’
‘What? Where?’
‘You’ll meet her very soon.’
‘Well what are we waiting for? Take me to her now. Like you said, Tremain will be here soon and I’m guessing we don’t want to be here when he arrives.’
‘It’s not as straightforward as that, Gareth. You’ll get to see her alright, and soon, don’t worry about that. Thing is it’s time you knew where you stand in the grand scheme of things.’
‘No shit,’ he said.
‘It’s certainly an interesting situation you’re in,’ she said. ‘On the one hand you have Lambert-Chide who wants to dissect you in the name of science, and Doradus who wants to do the same in the name of religious fundamentalism. But at least Lambert-Chide wants you alive, for now, which is one reason you’re still breathing now, otherwise Camael would have done the nasty on you and you’d be lying in a pile of mouldering back in Godstone. Either way, it’s not good news for you. Rock and a hard place, and all that.’
‘OK, so let’s take this one step at a time. Start with Camael. Why does he want my sister and me dead?’
She studied a dirty patch of linoleum at her feet. ‘In order to understand what’s going on you’ve got to go back to the origins of the Church of Everlasting Bliss, and that starts in about 1471.’
‘Everlasting Bliss? You kidding me?’
‘Are you going to shut your trap and listen? I thought you wanted to hear. Fine if you don’t, it’s your funeral!’
He held up his hands at her unexpected outburst. ‘Ok, sorry, go ahead…’
‘1471. Edward IV is on the throne of mediaeval England and the country is being rocked by a widespread outbreak of plague. It’s devastating, entire communities all but wiped out by the disease. Villages decimated with some never to recover. Given the sheer scale of this, and that religion was at the heart of medieval society it’s little wonder the plague was seen as God’s punishment visited upon a sinful world. Now into this mix add a man whose belief system was to extend even beyond the common orthodoxy of the day and whose life was to be transformed by the plague. His name was Benedict Jones.
‘On the face of it our Benedict seems nothing special. He’s a merchant who made his name in London. He was a successful man, part of what we call today the merchant aristocracy, having his fingers in many entrepreneurial pies. He owned properties which he rented out, he had part-ownership in ships that exported cloth to the Baltic and Low Countries, wool to Calais and imported goods from the Flemish markets. He had political ambitions, and his connections to the Crown because of his trading placed him in a good position for him to realise his ambitions. Things were looking up for Benedict Jones till the plague struck.
‘Records indicate the disease wiped out his entire family — his wife, his father, mother, cousins, grandparents — all of them died. The entire population of his district was virtually wiped out. And yet, in the midst of this carnage he survived. The loss of his family troubled him greatly. He commissioned a large stone memorial to them. It’s still there, if you look hard enough. His family all dead, his business hanging in tatters, being the man he is he decides to start up again from scratch.
‘Eight years pass and he remarries, again at the head of a successful trading business. This man clearly knows how to sell and make money. But in 1479 a fresh wave of plague strikes, and again everyone he knows and holds dear dies — his new wife, all her family, his friends, servants — all wiped out in an instant. But Benedict Jones survives a second time, and it is this second immersion in the aftermath of the plague that is the catalyst for the extraordinary thing he does next.
‘He believes the plague is Divine retribution on an unprecedented scale. Moreover it is all part of God’s Great Plan. There’s a printed pamphlet in which Benedict declares that God is now so distressed at seeing his wonderful creation being destroyed by man’s greed, lust, debauchery and war that He will wipe out the entire human race and return God’s earth to the heavenly state that existed before the Fall. A return to Eden.
‘There is nothing new in such sentiments being expressed at the time — all around was proof of God’s displeasure and that his wrath had been invoked. What makes our Benedict stand out as being different is his own part in God’s Great Plan. You could argue the loss of his family, twice over, affected his mind. Perhaps he went mad. Perhaps at the time he was trying to find a reason why he should live whilst all those he held close had died. In any event Benedict Jones next appears on trial accused of blasphemy of the highest order. It appeared, from the scraps of records left, that he’d set himself up as some kind of new messiah. God, you see, had preserved him whilst destroying others. God had chosen him to be his new Adam, and when the New Eden was eventually created, Benedict was to be set up as the earth’s natural leader, living forever with his chosen few followers in a world that was now pure, unsullied and free entirely from the sins of man that had so soiled the world and angered God.
‘Benedict Jones built up quite a following. People, fearful of the widespread death being handed out to prince and pauper alike, terrified that their souls would spend eternity in purgatory with no one to pray for them, condemned to the flaming pits of Hell for the accumulated sins of mankind, were easy targets for his preaching. He had a particularly strong following amongst the burgeoning and increasingly wealthy and powerful merchant class, which he’d been courting from early on, who were willing to pay handsomely to save their damned souls. Though his movement, which he called The Church of Everlasting Bliss, went underground for a number of years he was eventually denounced to the authorities.