Fragments (18 page)

She walked over
to the Church afterwards and sat at the back for a couple of hours
as parishioners in the prayer vigil came and went. Father Jacob was
alternating with Father Hector to make sure a priest was present at
all times and many other clergy were coming and going. The entire
London community of priests was trying to make sure they attended
the Church and prayed there at least once during this phase of
restoration.

She sat,
thinking, feeling the sense of space and light re-enter the Church,
and then drifted off, drifted into thinking of nothing very
much.

It wasn’t a
noise. It wasn’t a sound. It wasn’t a feeling. What was it?

Something had
flared her into life, brought her senses up full. The Church around
her had become huge, cavernous. The light from the stained glass
windows was flowing in but failing, stopping, not managing to reach
the air above her, not managing to illuminate the central space.
The people in the front pews were distant, tiny specks on her
consciousness. She could feel someone praying on her left, behind
her. She turned. A woman, old and round and puffing, a
multi-coloured head scarf on her hair, a worn rosary in her hands,
was praying in the depths of the left aisle. Her coal black spiral
tresses were tinged with grey. She exuded life, loving, and images
of joyous grandchildren roaring with laughter. Maryam could smell
jerk chicken, grits, all manner of mouth-watering things. She
turned back to the altar. The front pews were still far away,
floating somewhere else. The right hand aisle also held someone
praying, kneeling at the altar of the Lady. His hands were hidden
from her as he was leaning forward on the communion rail. It looked
as if he too held a rosary. She leaned forward, trying to see
clearly. His head was bowed; she could see nothing but the pale
back of his neck. He was thin, wiry looking and wore a waxed
jacket, the type that kept out the cutting wind and rain. As she
looked, she could smell wax; incense and wax. Not candle wax,
sealing wax. As soon as the thought was formed, the scent
strengthened, developed. The powerful smell of old books, lost
books, musty books, slammed into her. She sat back, breaking the
moment. The light that had been held above her cracked and
clattered to the ground. The altar was back where it should be. No
one else seemed to have noticed the noise. She stood up, sliding
sideways out of the central seating and headed up the side aisle
for the Virgin’s altar. As she moved, the smell became stronger,
more corrupt. Mould and decay caught at her throat, she tried not
to cough. The man was still kneeling, head bowed. He was less than
two feet from the tea roses she’d seen arranged the day before, yet
all she could smell was decay and deception. The stench became so
strong she gagged, had to cough or suffocate. The man jerked back,
looking at her approaching him. As he stood up from his knees, she
saw his face clearly, saw his eyes. Saw the darkness moving in
them; saw the lack of humanity, of love. Could see the depths of
despair caused by a complete absence of grace. She faltered,
tripped and fell as the darkness pushed into her.

By the time she
had been helped to her feet by the parishioners and a startled
Father Jacob, her head had cleared. The delicate scent of the tea
roses was mingled with incense, burning candles, aftershave and
perfume. She apologised for tripping and disturbing everyone’s
prayer. Father Jacob escorted her to the parish house, where he was
so concerned that he phoned Bishop Atkins. Maryam was quite content
with this; she was using all her energies in restoring her own
sense of belonging to herself and herself alone. It wouldn’t do to
alarm Father Jacob further and she happily accepted some tea from
him and let him sit with her and prattle away whilst they waited
out the good Bishop’s arrival.

When he did
arrive a scant half an hour later, which led Maryam to wonder if
Father Scott had gained tickets for speeding on their way, Wyn
Jones arrived with them. She was a little shocked by this, given
the police request, but it was clear he’d been alarmed to hear of
her fall and had wanted to see she was fine for himself. She
accepted this, but asked them to send a message to Scotland Yard
advising them that he had returned to the parish. Andy Scott phoned
Iqbal’s mobile phone number whilst Maryam discovered something
wonderful about Wyn Jones: he could make excellent coffee. He was
clearly a man taking his own territory back as he marshalled
together the water, ground beans, and a cafetiere that she hadn’t
known the kitchen held. Although he almost swore in frustration
when it took him five minutes to find which cupboard it was in.

‘The
parishioners have been busy.’

‘Mrs Olagbegi
has been rather frustrated by Pete’s refusal to let her ‘take
over’, as he put it.’

‘When did you
lose your housekeeper?’

‘Oh, many years
ago. The old one died and parish funds could not afford a new
one.’

‘Was Father
Edwards here then?’

‘He’s been here
thirty-five years.’ He stopped and looked at her. ‘Mrs Fisher, the
housekeeper, had been here for twenty years when she passed. I
think he still misses her.’

Fred returned
from the Church, where he’d popped in his head as he’d walked
Father Jacob back up. With Andy off the phone, they took their
coffee through to the parlour and firmly closed the door. Andy drew
a chair up against it as a precaution against a parishioner walking
in at the wrong moment.

Maryam
described what had occurred, although she did so as a light sketch,
not in detail. Some things you didn’t tell priests. Or anyone,
actually. She did describe the scent of the old books even as she
omitted the detail about the jerk chicken, and she described the
man in full.

‘That is Keith
Pargiter.’

They all stared
blankly at Father Jones.

‘You know
him?’

‘Well, yes,
he’s a stalwart of the parish. He’s an altar server and does some
ground work in the graveyard. He runs an antiquarian book shop on
Rye Road, although it does most of its business online, I believe.
He joined the parish about three years ago I think, when he bought
the shop. You’d have to ask Pete when exactly.’

‘And he’s a
regular parishioner?’ Andy spoke first.

‘Oh yes, one of
the faithful, as I said, can always be trusted to help out if we
need it. He’s also been very good at donating bibles and religious
texts to us if they are of no commercial value. We have a lot of
things that Keith has passed on.’

‘Does he have
keys to the Church?’ Maryam asked.

‘Well, not as
such, no, but he’s on the cleaning rota with the others, why?’

‘I’m not sure
how to tell you this, Father Jones, but the man I saw was Geoffrey
Embleton.’

Gatto and Iqbal
turned up about twenty minutes later. They asked Wyn if it would be
all right if he went for a walk or went up to his room... or
really, wasn’t he sure he wouldn’t be happier at the
Cathedral?’

Father Jones
had capitulated with a sigh and declared he was going to go and
clear his head and walk back over to the other side of the river.
He’d been cooped up for days between the police station and the
cloister, and so he was off to get some fresh air.

‘Well, some
London rain, I suppose,’ he said as he opened the door to discover
the heavens had opened once more.

He took his
overcoat and a brolly from the hallway and departed. Iqbal followed
him out to make sure he went past the Church, then returned to the
parlour.

Once more they
laid out the files and started to go through them meticulously.
Gatto had brought with him photographs from Embleton’s file and
Maryam confirmed that was the man who had been praying in the
Church before. She didn’t mention anything other than noticing him
‘because of a smell of old books’.

‘And Father
Jones knew him as Keith Pargiter?’

‘Yes. He runs a
book shop, old books.’

‘Well, if it is
him, it’ll be interesting to see if he has an old Qur’an in stock.
Or rather, missing.’

‘Didn’t
Inspector Barham ask for the antiquarian book shops to be looked
into, to see where the copy of the Qur’an could have come from?’
Iqbal asked Gatto.

‘Yes, she did,
son. Keep asking questions like that and you’ll do okay.’ Iqbal
almost blushed but held it off by staring hard at some
paperwork.’

‘And you got a
strange feeling off him, did you, Miss Michael?’

‘I never said
that, Sergeant Gatto, did I?’

‘No, you
didn’t, what was I thinking?’ His wry tone fooled no one. Maryam
sipped some coffee and looked placid and neutral. Gatto excused
himself and went outside to phone headquarters in private to see if
the book shop had already been visited. Iqbal stayed and took them
through what they’d uncovered in their own inquiries.

‘Shortly after
Embleton was issued the ASBO for the mosque conversion, he was
admitted to hospital. He was suffering from malnutrition and
dehydration. There were marks on his body, self inflicted.’

‘What sort of
marks?’

‘He’d whipped
himself with something that had metal on it. One of the wounds on
his back had become infected and it was the blood poisoning that
caused him to collapse in Marks & Spencer’s. After treatment,
he was voluntarily admitted to a psychiatric unit. No idea of the
diagnosis or treatment, still looking.’

Maryam sighed.
‘It is rather unfortunate that Mr Pargiter appears to have been
born in the wrong millennium.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Never mind,
Detective, carry on.’

‘He came back
into police view about two years later, when he was the subject of
a complaint from a synagogue in Golders Green. He had been trying
to convert to Judaism and things were not going well. I’m not sure
what that means. He’d been asked to leave the synagogue in question
and not return.’

‘And he kept
coming back?’

‘Yes, Bishop,
he did. I spoke to the local officer who worked on this case. It
was only when Mr Embleton was threatened with an ASBO that he
backed off.’

‘Did they know
of the prior one?’

‘Yes, they did.
They’d been looking into his background and it popped up in the
system. PC Shirley Deal, who phoned me back, remembers him as it
was such an odd case. Although still registered at his Peckham
address, he was staying with friends in Golders Green. Intellectual
sorts with a huge house; always had lots of people staying. She
went round there and spoke to him, pointed out his previous ASBO
and that they’d apply for another one for the synagogue if he kept
pushing it. From her account, he left the area there and then.’

‘When was
this?’

Iqbal looked at
his notes. ‘About three years ago.’

‘Well,’ said
Maryam, in a tone that made Gatto feel as if he was talking to his
Chief Inspector. ‘I think we need to do two things. Firstly,
establish that Keith Pargiter and Geoffrey Embleton are the same
person, and then prove a connection between him and Jason
Briggs.’

She’d been
expecting it to be a slow and tedious affair. Police work was,
despite the film and television versions of everything happening
within two days. However, circumstances moved quickly once her
report had been received in Rome. It only took twenty-four hours
for Rome to return the information that Keith Archibald Pargiter
had been accepted into training for the priesthood in 1964, when he
was twenty years old. He had been carefully nurtured by his family,
who had presented him as a gifted scholar and dedicated postulant.
It had helped that the family had the wealth to support his
training in Rome itself. The report she received back, which
included a scan of a faded passport photo of the young man, was
scant. It outlined only that Keith had had immense difficulty in
accepting the changes being deliberated in the Holy City by the
Vatican II council. He left the seminary by mutual consent in 1967.
Rome had no more record of him. The fact that his true name was
Pargiter and not Embleton helped the police untangle
everything.

Keith Pargiter
had been arrested and convicted of arson in 1970 and had spent
three years in a secure psychiatric unit before being deemed
‘cured’ of the religious obsession that had resulted him in burning
an Anglican Church to the ground. On release, he’d been sent to a
private sanatorium in Switzerland by his family. He’d disappeared
off the radar until turning up in Peckham three years prior, to
inherit his maternal uncle’s book shop. However, his fingerprints
were on file, and they matched the fingerprints of Geoffrey
Embleton, which had been taken in the fuss that had resulted in the
ASBO. The 1970 files were from Surrey police and had never made it
into a computer database.

The matching of
the fingerprints allowed Barham to seek a search warrant for
Pargiter’s shop and his flat above. Pargiter himself had flown: no
one had seen him since he encountered Maryam in the Church. The
investigation into the shop accounts revealed an industrial storage
unit where he kept the majority of his stock. Whilst the shop and
the house had revealed nothing out of the ordinary, the storage
unit was packed with all manner of occult and religious texts,
including several copies of the Qur’an. It also contained crates of
artefacts: chalices, altar cloths and a myriad of Catholic altar
vessels. One small box had been locked and bolted into a larger
crate and stored out of sequence with everything else. It contained
two items, a communion chalice and a crucifix. Both bore the
fingerprints of Jason Briggs. The feet of Christ on the base of the
Crucifix also had his saliva and epithelia: he had kissed it at
some point, no doubt when Keith had been tutoring him on Catholic
tradition. Maryam could have returned home at that point, but she
chose to stay on and see the parish settled back down. It was an
odd time for all concerned. Wyn was allowed to return with no
problem, and as he’d never been charged, there was no press
coverage on him in connection with the murder. That was one reason
Barham had been so meticulous on his being taken in and out of the
police station on a daily basis. A dedication to preserving the
reputation of those that passed though her official hands that
Maryam appreciated. Not all officers of the law were so
diligent.