Caroline took bread out of its cellophane wrapper and poured soup into two plastic dishes. She handed one over to Gareth. ‘Don’t expect me to play house all the time,’ she said.
‘You’re avoiding my question again,’ he said. ‘Why are you involved in all this? Was it simply to get at Tremain?’
She blew over the hot soup, steam flaking off like spirits. ‘Pipistrelle is my father,’ she said, then checked herself. ‘Well, not really my father. I’ve no idea who that is. But he cared for me, brought me up when my mother died. He’s the only family I’ve got. I haven’t got anyone else. Regular orphan Annie.’
‘What is he, some kind of vigilante?’
She smirked. ‘Hardly the type,’ she said. She put the dish on the floor. ‘Look, final history lesson, so listen up. Pipistrelle — real name Charles Rayne. This all began when his grandfather, Inspector Thomas Rayne, a cop in the Met, investigated the murder of a man called Jimmy Tate back in 1929. It’s a murder that’s never solved. In fact a lid seemed to be put on the case, and Thomas Rayne finds himself put conveniently out of action when he starts to get close to the truth. Anyhow, he continues with his investigations privately. Charles Rayne, his grandson, takes over the project when his grandfather dies. He gradually builds upon his grandfather’s studies and is amazed to confirm what his grandfather had posited. See, once he realised Evelyn Carter had used one false ID after another, always following the same pattern of taking on a dead person’s identity he was able, over twenty years additional painstaking research, to build up a bigger picture as to how long she’d been doing it. And it turns out that stretched back a mighty long time.
‘Evelyn Carter and Jimmy Tate had something in common. First, they both used dead people’s identities — the first clue for Rayne that they were connected in some way; secondly, Evelyn’s reaction to the recounting of Jimmy’s death by David Lambert-Chide, as mentioned in Rayne’s journal, suggested she might have been closely attached. Turns out she was. So Charles did more digging around Jimmy Tate, using his trail of false IDs as stepping stones all the way back to a man called Stephen de Bailleul, a man who shared her death-defying genes, who taught her to survive. Charles’ conclusion was the bizarre possibility that there had obviously been a number of people who had lived a tad more than their allotted three score and ten. Not only that, his investigations into the medieval symbol uncovered the continuing presence, albeit in secret, of the Church of Everlasting Bliss. It soon became apparent to him that people like Evelyn Carter and de Bailleul had been systematically hunted down and exterminated by this Church. Condemned by the Church as being Serpentiles — you remember, the descendents of the original Eden serpent — they used some kind of God’s Holy Hit Man called Camael, otherwise known as the Dark Angel of Doradus, to despatch the unlucky victims in a sick and time-honoured ceremony. You’ve seen what that looks like and it isn’t pretty. So not only did these poor people have to continually reinvent themselves every few years so as not to draw unwanted attention to themselves, they had to contend with the Church of Everlasting Bliss on their tails determined to wipe out every last one of them. Anyhow, at the beginning the Lunar Club didn’t know fully about the Church and its workings. For Charles Rayne and his grandfather before him it all began with Evelyn Carter. It starts out as historical inquisitiveness — what would it be like to speak to a woman who has lived four hundred years? Every historian’s dream. Charles, however, has an illness that keeps him indoors out of sunlight so he thinks it’s time to go to his two colleagues who make up the Lunar Club, fellow historians whom he trusts. He convinces them she exists and they pool resources and skills, eventually managing to locate the woman they think might be Evelyn working as a maid in a hotel under an assumed identity.
‘They don’t want to spook her so Howard Baxter keeps a low profile, and just as he’s about to make first contact at the woman’s home men turn up and take her away. At first he thinks it’s Doradus, but he follows them to the Lambert-Chide building in Brentwood on the Golden Mile. More to the point they enter by the back door. She goes in but she doesn’t come out. The Lunar Club do some historical digging and discover that labs below the building had been used for clandestine research into chemical warfare during the Second World War.
‘They don’t fully know what’s going on, but by putting two and two together they suspect Evelyn is being held as part of some kind of experiments into ageing. They needed to get her out and that’s where my mother, Stephanie Jacobs, comes into it. Howard Baxter managed to secure a secondment in the archives at Brentford in order to spy out the comings and goings of staff. Eventually he spotted, and was able to target, my mother. Pipistrelle persuaded her to help get Evelyn out of the lab complex. She died freeing her.
‘Evelyn’s heavily pregnant with twins. You’re born OK, but as you know your twin sister dies during birth. Evelyn is moved to a safe house the Lunar Club have prepared. At first, they don’t agree about what they should do next. They know they’re sitting on weird stuff here. One of them argues for going public. The others urge caution. Whilst they’re arguing it out Doradus comes sniffing too close to Evelyn’s safe house. She suspects, wrongly, that the Lunar Club is in cahoots with Doradus and she makes a bolt for it with you as a babe in arms. Lambert-Chide was right: she chose to abandon you rather than risk Doradus finding you with her. That couldn’t have been an easy choice for her to make.
‘But that’s not quite the end of the story. Charles loses all sign of Evelyn but traces you to a welsh orphanage. He knows you are Evelyn’s child; you are found with a tiny coin on a chain which he saw her make for you after you were born. It was almost as if sooner or later she knew you must part ways, but needed some way of demonstrating who she was if she had to come back into your life. And that had to happen at some point, in order to help you survive.
‘As for the Lunar Club, things get a little heated. It dawns on them they’re dealing with something far more sinister, far bigger than they bargained for with the Church of Everlasting Bliss, meaning they dare not go public. That would have been virtual suicide when they realise the depth of Doradus’ influence in society. Two of them — Carl Wood and Howard Baxter decide it’s best to let the entire thing drop, for their own safety, so the Lunar Club collapses and the men hardly see each other again, keeping quiet about the entire affair. But Pipistrelle can’t forget Evelyn or you. He tries to find her again, but he can’t do it on his own. That’s why he eventually needed me.’
They ate in silence. Gareth’s mind had reached overload, all manner of conflicting emotions swirling sickeningly within him and adding to his utter sense of confusion. The overriding feeling was one of despair. It hung in the cold, clammy air, wrapped its chilled arms around him. Erica laid still, her face slightly twisted by pain. He put his barely-touched soup on the floor and lifted her head carefully so that it rested on his lap. He stared fixedly at the few strands of her hair that draped thread-like over his fingers.
‘She knew she had to help you survive, in the same way she’d been taught by de Bailleul,’ Caroline said. ‘She’d prepared false ID, and the box of gold was for you. It wasn’t stolen. It had been acquired over a long period of time. Gold is truly portable. She always avoided banks. Safer to have something stashed away you can exchange for money rather than traceable accounts. And she generally only took jobs where she could keep her head low, where few questions are asked about the comings and goings of employees, working for cash-in-hand, leaving as little a trail as possible. But Doradus discovered where she’d been working in Manchester, made a botched attempt at killing her then came close to discovering who you really were. So she was forced out of hiding earlier than planned. The rest is history,’ she said, not fully realising the irony of her words.