Fragments (14 page)

‘I have
discussed my... misgivings with Andrew here. But I assure you, he
is free to make up his own mind. I brought no one else in, as we
simply don’t have any one gifted enough. The only person I could
have recommended to you is the one being accused.’

He got up and
left. The atmosphere in the room did not improve.

‘You have to
forgive us both, Father Scott. Old wounds, old battles.’

Scott stoically
poured out tea that no one would drink.

It was just
past two a.m. when she and Andy walked across through the graveyard
and entered the Church by the main doors. It was odd that this was
the longest way from the parish house to the Church, but the one
that everyone took. The stone wall that separated the two did push
you down midway between the two, but there was a diagonal path up
to the Sacristy end, that no one ever used. She’d watched and
noted.

The drizzle was
refreshing and she’d dressed for cold, so the wind didn’t bother
her. Andy carried her work case as it was important that she unlock
the door and open up.

At the
transept, in front of the sanctuary containing the altar, she laid
out her work tools. The sight of the dried blood without the police
tape made it even more macabre. Andy was so nervous she was tempted
to shout ‘Boo!’ in his ear, but she refrained.

‘First things
first.’ She laid out a dozen or so incense cones. As she lit them,
she asked Andy to distribute them about the nave. Smoke curled up
and flowed around them.

‘Is there any
special order to putting them somewhere?’

‘No, I just
want all areas of the Church to be covered by them.’ She did the
altar, the apse, and the side altars, and set Andy to put a couple
up in the choir.

She took her
camera out and photographed the smoke as it rose and curled from
the cones.

‘We’re
documenting the air flow.’

‘Why?’

‘So we know
where the air flow is.’ She smiled. ‘Not everything is more than it
seems.’

He was
relaxing, good.

The smoke did
exactly what she thought it would. She talked it through with
him.

‘The air from
windows and doors create a natural air flow. With the main doors at
the back and a good tight seal on the stained glass windows, you’d
expect the smoke to slowly drift off to the main doors. The choir
smoke should go up and then spiral down into the nave and add to
the flow to the back doors. At the altar, the smoke will rise and
swirl in line with how good the window seals are. It should collect
at the dome. At the transept, depending how the doors face the wind
and how good the seals and hinges are, it should part; some will go
out that way, some will add to the smoke collecting in the
ceiling.’

She
photographed the eddies and flows and, in the main, the smoke did
exactly as she predicted.

‘Wow.’ Andy
sounded impressed.

‘No, not wow:
science.’ Her smile was genuine.

When they’d
documented the entire Church, they moved the cones to the areas
where the police tape had been, in tight rows. Thick streams of
smoke did exactly as the thinner ones had done earlier. She
photographed them, paying close attention to the confessional box
that had been taped off. There was nothing unusual about the air
flow. When six were placed on the bloodied altar, the smoke
billowed up and split, half rolling up to the dome that was
somewhat behind the altar and the rest flowing up to the nave roof.
It then drifted slowly to the gospel side, towards the side door
there.

Asking Andy to
open all the outer doors, she collected all the cones and dampened
them. Then they waited for the Church to clear. It took a good half
hour and the temperature dropped sharply. They watched the doors
that had been opened and managed to get the Church sealed back down
again before any of the promised patrols noticed anything.

‘We’ve
established the normal air flow for the building, now we clean and
clear.’

Maryam took a
long thin blade out from the partitioned lining of her case. About
nine inches long, double sided.

‘It’s steel,
and will suffice as a sword, or a dagger, depending on the
ritual.’

She walked over
to the altar and started to draw shapes in the air using the blade,
also touching her head, chest, heart, and mouth. She started facing
East and the transept doorway. Andrew heard her call out to the
angel Rafael in Latin. She turned South and spoke out Michael, then
West and Gabriel. She turned North, facing the apse and the
tabernacle, and spoke the name Uriel. The hairs on the back of
Andy’s neck stood up and he turned away. He came to understand
Fred’s resistance in a visceral, emotional way. It was one thing to
know, intellectually, that the Arcane did things that you wouldn’t
do in normal service. That you knew there were exorcism rites in
the Church and priests trained to deliver them. It was quite
another thing to actually witness a woman on the altar, speaking
Latin, drawing pentagrams in the air with a sword, speaking the
name of an arch-angel never mentioned in the bible; not part of
your faith, your canon. To witness her doing this with an altar
stained with blood, someone’s life blood. He felt sick and ran to
the back doors.

He made it to
the toilet tucked in the back of the vestibule and threw up. His
body shook as he washed his face and hands, rinsed out his mouth.
What had been an intellectual understanding that someone had tried
to commit sacrilege in a Church was now a fundamental emotional
connection for him. He was covered in cold sweat when he returned
to Maryam and her work upon the altar, wondering if he had the
strength for it.

She was
finishing off the
nunc dimittis
and he searched his memory
for why she might be dismissing a servant of the Lord, encouraging
them to pass over.

‘
Quod
parasti ante faciem omnium populorum... Lumen ad revelationem
gentium, et gloriam plebis tuae Israel...
’

As she spoke
she was sprinkling water, holy water, all over the altar and on any
area of dried blood on the stone flags of the floor.

He sat down on
the front pew shaking, his head in his hands. Oh, he was the wrong
person for this. In his heart of hearts, he’d been dismissive of
the Bishop’s objections and feelings. Not now. Now he was impressed
at Atkins’s strength, how he’d accepted the command of his Church
despite his personal feelings. Humility: it was a never ending
lesson.

Something odd
occurred as the prayer came to an end. He felt a breeze across his
face, caught the scent of... roses. Neither rose oil nor rose
incense, or even chemical rose scented air freshener; it was the
fragrance of real flowers. The delicate scent of tea roses. He
raised his head. By the altar, Maryam Michael was standing with her
arms outstretched and palms uplifted. Despite the blood, the death,
the finger print powder covering everything... there was a sense of
deep peace, of acceptance, communion and freedom, emanating from
the altar. His mind could not comprehend it but his soul, the core
of him that prayed and reached for God, responded. Andrew Scott got
down on his knees, blessed himself with the sign of the Holy Cross
and prayed for the soul that had just departed: wishing with all
the strength of his own soul, that the departed one would find
peace, acceptance, forgiveness, and divine love. That it would move
into a state of Grace.

Maryam did not
bother the young priest with words or explanations. She accepted
his profound need to feel the journey he was upon and not to mar
those feelings with words, intellect and questions. She cleared her
equipment back into her pack and silently jotted down notes for her
report.

Lesser mark
of the pentagram completed: working area protected. Nunc dimittis
finished. Distinct sense of a soul both locked into place and then
released. Scent of tea roses.
She paused, wondering, thinking;
filtering.
Mother of All Sorrows?
Rome would puzzle upon her
report and decide on action, if any. She suspected this parish
might be receiving more funding, and more priests, to keep its
flame alive. What a pity that Wyn Jones would be moved on.

She opened out
her inner case and brought out a crucible and a mortar and pestle.
She selected frankincense and ground alfalfa grasses, crushed and
blended them together. She then added a single dried rose petal.
The mixture was tipped into the crucible and the lid put on. She
readied her camera to one side and moved the crucible onto the
altar, in the centre, which was free from blood stain as the sheets
of the Qur’an had kept it clear. She lit the mixture and put the
lid back on. When the smoke was beginning to flow out from under
the edges she used crucible tongs and lifted the lid clean off. A
cloud of smoke bellowed up. She picked her camera up.

Andrew watched
as the smoke rolled up... and stopped. How it condensed into itself
and hung in the air above the altar. How it rolled into itself in a
delicate swirling ball, until the heat from below died and it
dissipated. How it drifted down, back towards the altar, gently
flowed over it and disappeared on the stone flags of the floor. He
was too astonished to pray.

Altar tested
positive for supernatural interference.

She tested
several locations. Both altar and tabernacle tested positive. The
confessional and the choir did not. The strongest reading was from
the Sacristy, as she’d expected.

It was well
past dawn by the time she’d finished and cleared up. Andy had
stayed and watched. They walked back over in the companionable
silence that had slowly been restored to them through the night’s
endeavours. Whilst he made them both some breakfast, Maryam typed
up an initial report and emailed it through to Rome. She requested
permission to continue her investigation by interviewing Wyn Jones,
outlining some of her concerns and in particular, her suspicion
about his uncommon silence with the police.

The day had a
lot of chaos in it and they were both drained. Andrew took the
couch in the parlour and Maryam got two hours sleep lying on the
bed in her room. First, the doorbell started ringing, and then the
phone never stopped. The house began to fill up. The police leaving
the scene had allowed the women of the parish in to take charge of
the cleaning and cooking, and setting everything to rights. Two new
priests arrived, settled in upstairs and then began to prepare
rotas for an all night prayer vigil in the Church. The cleaning
company finished the crime scene clear up and a veritable mob
descended on the church to clean and set up for the ceremony.
Maryam watched a local woman arrange a spray of pink tea roses with
white baby’s breath on the side altar dedicated to Mary. On the
other side, dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, she set in
place a vase of crimson carnations. She confirmed that those were
the flowers that were always placed there. Sometimes the tea roses
were white, sometimes yellow: they were always tea roses.

‘Father
Edwards, he says the Lady likes tea roses and he often smells them
here. So we always try and make sure there are some fresh ones in.
The florist donates them when she can. Tell me, do you know if the
Fathers are well?’

When the email
arrived from Rome granting her full permission to proceed with an
occult inquiry, she checked with Atkins where Wyn Jones was. As
she’d thought, he was back at the police station. Fred assured her
that they’d send someone to pick her up and bring her over to
Westminster as soon as Wyn returned. Would she like to move into a
room there now? She almost said yes, then thought better of it and
said she’d stay here but would it be all right if she came over for
dinner that evening? She and Wyn could eat and talk then. Fred
agreed and Maryam took her weary body back upstairs and slept
through the chaos of the various women of the parish finally having
free rein to clear out decades of Father Edwards’s smoking. They
were stripping the covers off the furniture as she went past the
parlour. The sight both made her smile and her heart ache: what if
the old priest could never bear to return?

The four of
them ate together, Fred, Maryam, Andy and Wyn Jones. The
Westminster housekeepers had laid out a set of cold cuts with
salads, there was warm soup in an electric tureen; breads and
cheeses. Wyn had arrived back from the police station very late and
was drained, as were they all. Fred had opened an excellent bottle
of wine, then another, and then had brought in some port. Wyn had
eaten little and drunk less. The case against him was building
momentum. Everyone in the room understood that if he was called
back to the police station again in the morning, he would be
unlikely to return. As soon as he was formally charged, his life,
his ministry, his priesthood, was gone. The press would descend and
devour him whole. Fred, who had been informed of Maryam’s
assessment by his own Cardinal, was on edge. He tried everything he
could to deflect Maryam, defer her interviewing Wyn. Maryam put up
with this until the eating was over and she felt she had enough of
a measure of Wyn to proceed on her own, and quietly dismissed both
Fred and Andy. This she would need to do on her own.

Wyn Jones
watched the tiny woman with the grey eyes and silver hair send
Bishop Atkins out of the room with a nod of her head. His heart let
loose a little of the pain it was carrying. He was not sure who
he’d been expecting, but he had trusted in His Lord to send him
someone to help. He had not expected a fiery angel or a burning
bush, but he’d been praying for some sign that he was going to get
out of the hole he was now in. Looking at the calm and demure face
of the woman in front of him, he prayed that good things really did
come in small packages.

Maryam went
straight into it, knowing that with her, unlike with the police,
Wyn had no choice but to answer when he could. It was when he could
not answer she was interested in, but bided her time.