White male.
30–45.
Manual worker — possibly in catering business, local pub, restaurant.
Former armed services, probably army, lower rank.
Lives locally.
Drives car or van.
5 ft 11 inches.
13½–14 stone.
42-inch chest min.
36-inch waist min.
No previous criminal record.
Megan hesitates before adding another line, a final word: ‘Ruthless.’
She’s sure the offender isn’t a regular burglar or robber, but he didn’t hesitate to choke a policeman unconscious and left Gideon Chase to die in a fire.
Whoever he is, he’ll kill rather than be caught.
36
The screech of wild geese wakes Gideon.
He’s groggy and his whole body aches as he makes his way to the bathroom. Through a window he watches four of the birds fighting for territory around the garden’s small lake. Flapping and flying at each other in full beak-to-beak combat. After an ear-piercing cry, the loser and its mate flutter away low over the surrounding fields.
He investigates the old showerhead over the rust-stained enamel bath. It is coked up with limescale, yet although the pipes cough and wheeze, it runs surprisingly fast. No shampoo, but there is a bar of soap on the sink. He takes it, climbs into the tub and pulls the flimsy plastic curtain around him to catch the erratic spray.
The hot water feels good. It eases some of the tension in his shoulders as he remembers what he’d discovered in the journals he’d read late last night.
Thirteen months after the death of his mother, his father joined the Followers of the Sacreds. At first Gideon thought this was some kind of local historic society. Only it wasn’t. It turned out to be something very different. He reasoned his father took some desperate spiritual comfort from the stones, much in the way that many grieving people do from the church. Nathaniel called them ‘Sacreds’ and came to regard each rock as a touchstone, a source of help. His writings detailed how one stone could give spiritual renewal and banish depression, while another could provide physical strength and resilience. And there were others.
Gideon’s amused at the thought of Stonehenge as some kind of magical aromatherapy circle. Who’d have thought that his much-published brilliant father would have believed such a thing? Marie’s death must have driven him off the rails. That would explain things.
The hot water suddenly runs cold. He clambers out of the tub and grabs a hard grey towel. He dries and puts his old clothes back on. They smell of smoke from the fire but he can’t bring himself to go through his dead father’s wardrobes and drawers, not even for underwear.
Downstairs, he finds an opened box of Bran Flakes but no milk. He pours a handful into a cup and dry chews his way through them while looking out the kitchen window. Several pheasants strut by as though they own the place, glancing at him as they go about their business. He finishes the meagre breakfast, grabs a glass of tap water and takes it back upstairs.
Books are strewn all over the place but he’s in no mood to tidy. All he wants to do is read. Devour the text until he can make some sense of it all. He picks up last night’s final volume and follows the decoded notes he made in pencil above his father’s writing:
The ways of the Craft are wonderfully simple. Divinely pure. Our ancestors were right. There is not one single god. There are many. No wonder the leaders and followers of every religion fervently believe that they alone have discovered the Messiah. They have merely discovered one Messiah. They have stumbled upon spiritual trace evidence of the Sacreds — of lives the Sacreds have touched — of gifts they have given.
It is a shame that these followers pray so indiscriminately to their particular gods. If only they knew their deity was capable of delivering a single specific blessing alone. Man’s desire to monopolise religion has closed his mind to its multifarious benevolence.
Gideon tries to stay open-minded. Evidently, his father believed that the stones were vessels. Houses for the Gods. Was it so mad? Billions of people have believed similar things: that gods live in their places of worship, that they hover mysteriously in golden tabernacles on high altars, or that they can be conjured up by ritualised gestures or mass prayers. He guesses his father’s beliefs are no more ridiculous.
He looks down at the book in his hands and the dark ink from his father’s pen. The page has physically absorbed the man’s inner thoughts. Even decades after they were written, the words convey something that he can’t quite grasp — an emotional contact with his father. It’s almost like he’s touching him.
Gideon wonders if that’s what happens when you touch the stones? Do you absorb thoughts and feelings, wisdom, from people who lived long before you — the wisest of the ancients — people so great that they were considered to be gods?
Only now when the notion of the Sacreds doesn’t seem so insane, does he return to the words that troubled him.
ΨΝΚΚΦ.
Blood.
ΖΩΧΗΠΤΠΧΥ
Sacrifice.
Only now does he dare read the entry in fulclass="underline"
The Sacreds need renewal. It needs to be constant or else their decay and decline will be accelerated. The evidence is already there. How foolish it is to think that we may draw from them but not replenish them. The divinities are rooted in the blood and bone of our ancestors. They gave themselves for us. And we must give ourselves to them.
There must be sacrifice. There must be blood. Blood for the sake of future generations, for the sake of all, and especially that of my darling son.
Gideon’s shocked to see himself mentioned. But not as shocked as when he reads on:
I will willingly give my own blood, my own life. I only hope it is worthy. Worthy enough to change things. To alter the fate that I know awaits my poor, motherless son.
37
‘Have you found my missing person, yet?’ DCI Jude Tompkins bowls the question down the corridor to Megan Baker, who is skittled while carrying a cup of tea from the pantry area back to her desk.
‘No ma’am. Not yet.’
‘But you’re doing it, right? You’ve been through the file I gave you and you have some leads?’ She gestures grandly in the air. ‘And I’m absolutely sure that you’ve also already contacted his family and got your hands on at least one photograph.’
Megan ignores the sarcasm. ‘Ma’am, I’m still working the Nathaniel Chase case.’
‘I know. I’m not Alzheimic. I recall with total clarity that you’re also working the missing person case I gave you — so work it.’ She gives a caustic stare and veers off towards her own office.
Megan curses. She walks to her desk, slops hot tea from the flimsy plastic cup on to her fingers, and curses again. She wipes her hands on a tissue and flips open the MP file her boss dumped on her. She’d been hoping to sub-dump it on Jimmy Dockery but he’s gone AWOL.
She reads through the summary: the twin sister of some twenty-five-year-old bum called Tony Naylor has reported him missing. Several times by the look of things. Naylor is unemployed, has an alcohol dependency problem and appears to make a bit of cash-in-hand labouring on building sites.
He’s a typical drifter, the hand-to-mouth kind. No mum and dad. No fixed abode. Just wanders around drawing benefits and working on the quiet. A ghost in the machine. She reads on. The only regular contact he seems to have is with the sister, Nathalie. He calls her — reverse charge — once a week.