Night Sessions, The (5 page)

“Yes, yes,” said Ferguson.

“Mr. Donald Nardini,” continued the leki. “You may expect to hear from him.”

“No doubt,” said Ferguson. “Can't say I like the prospect.” A thought struck him. “Who was Murphy's boss, line manager, whatever?”

“Bishop Hugh Curley. Dr. Curley, if you prefer. He has of course been informed.”

Ferguson tipped back his chair and gazed at the ceiling. Dealing with an organisation whose very existence the government, police, civil service,
and public sector officially ignored could become complicated. It had been straightforward back in the old days, when the God Squads had their boots on the floor of every church, chapel, synagogue and mosque in the land. Ferguson found himself blushing at the recollection of some of the things he'd done then. Non-cognisance was now the modus vivendi.

“Relations with church officials could be a bit of a minefield,” he mused.

“It is not at all like a minefield,” said the leki.

Ferguson heard the remark as a reproach. A different reproach came to him as an image arose in his real, inner memory, a mental picture of a short, middle-aged man with a double chin and a comb-over of lank ginger hair; eyes in deltas of wrinkles behind spectacles that almost certainly didn't run code; a buttoned black overcoat raw at the cuffs and tight at the waist. A man whose body parts were now puzzle pieces on a steel table in a cold room four floors below. Father Liam Murphy, deceased. Whether he was the victim of someone else or of himself, the most important thing about his life deserved the dignity of being spoken aloud.

“The hell with it,” said Ferguson, rocking forward. “Let's call these people by the names and titles they choose. Give the bishop a call, pass on my respects and condolences, and offer him a slot in my diary. His place or ours, I don't care.”

“Very good, boss,” said the leki.

In the corner of Ferguson's eye a reminder popped up.
Investigation team meeting, room 386, five minutes
.

He blinked it away and stood up.

“Back to work,” he said.

Somebody had hand-blocked “Easter Road Incident Room” on an A4 sheet and Blu-tacked it to the door, not quite aligned with a virtual overlay that spelled out the same; seen through contact lenses, the effect was slightly cross-eyed, like a line on an optician's chart diagnostic of astigmatism. Ferguson resisted the impulse to move the paper into synch. One wall of the incident room was like a fragment of the situation page made actual: whiteboard with scrawls and arrows; pinned-up photos and notes; strips of black ribbon tape making connections. The rationale for this was the same as for paper notebooks, film cameras and, for that matter, police paperwork in general: it was hard to hack and harder still to crash. There had been a time when such things had happened, when whole bodies of evidence and terabytes of records had been corrupted by some random script-monkey, or wiped altogether by an electromagnetic-pulse truckbomb, its devastation unnoticed by passers-by until they checked their watch or phone or the song in their ears stopped.

Not any more. Hard copy. Get it down. That was the drill. Nothing less would stand up in court.

Ferguson placed himself with his back to the board and surveyed the team. DS Hutchins sat behind a desk at the front. DCs Patel and Connolly stood at either side of her. Police Sergeant Dennis Carr stood at parade rest to their left. Sitting on top of a desk, elbows on knees, was Tony Newman from Forensics. Right at the back of the room, shabbily dressed in colours that might have been chosen as office camo, was DCI Mohammed Mukhtar. Chief of the local Special Branch, thirty-odd years on the force, he was among the last of the anti-terrorism old guard. These days he kept track of Sozi dead-enders, Constitutionalist subversives and Unionist splinter groups. Mukhtar seldom emerged from the woodwork, and when he did it was usually a bad sign.

Amongst them all, scattered across the office furniture like an infestation of metallic spiders, sprawled six lekis—one for each of them, Ferguson presumed. His own leki stood, telescopic legs locked, at his side. When Ferguson experimentally downshifted the spectrum on his contact lenses he could detect the continuous infrared flicker of robot repartee crisscrossing the room. The effect was somehow disquieting, and for no gain, so he blinked the normal colours back. He set his phone clip to screen all but emergency calls, then cleared his throat.

“Thank you all for coming here,” Ferguson began, making it sound as though he was grateful that they'd all turned out quite voluntarily for a dull meeting in a draughty hall on a wet night. “In a moment, DS Hutchins will give us a summary. All I want at this point is to lay down a couple of ground rules. The first is that we refer to and address the Catholic—and any other—clergy we come across with a modicum of respect. None of that ‘mister,’ ‘citizen,’ and ‘cult administrator’ jargon from now on. Not on this investigation.

“Second, no speculation about or references to terrorism in public—and that means, ladies, gentlemen and lekis, outside the investigation. Not until or unless I say so.” He locked stares with DCI Mukhtar. “Everyone clear?”

Mukhtar shrugged. “I take it that last point doesn't apply to Special Branch?”

“That's understood,” said Ferguson. “Provided they keep it within SB. In fact, within those on SB working on this specific investigation.”

“Our discretion is assured,” said Mukhtar. He spoke in his default accent, that of middle-class Edinburgh with an English clip to the vowels. His other accents were as distinctive. “And I'll insist the chaps are polite to the God-botherers.”

“Very well,” said Ferguson, above the collective snort and smirk. He stepped away from the front of the board. “DS Hutchins—over to you.”

Ferguson took a seat as Hutchins took the floor. Shonagh Hutchins could have slipped unnoticed into any office crowd. In this crowd, she stood out. Even the lekis seemed to sit up and lean forward a little. Hutchins tabbed with a laser pointer at successive items on the board as she spoke.

“OK,” she said, “here's the situation as it stands. We still don't know what we're dealing with here. The cause of the explosion looks pretty definite—couple of kilos of RDX. The dead man had likewise definitely handled the unexploded material, which doesn't of course mean that he set it off, deliberately or otherwise. The best bet, I would say, is a parcel bomb, which he opened and which exploded after some—possibly very short—delay. Obviously, the Bomb Squad are searching for any wrapping or packaging, so far without success. The two injured women from the floors above aren't yet in any condition to speak, and aren't expected to be for several days at the earliest. The good news is that they can be expected to pull through to that extent at least, so we have two women constables down at the Western ready to take statements and to keep watch on them in the meantime, just in case. DCI Mukhtar has a couple of officers on discreet surveillance—armed, of course. I'll ask him for background in a moment, but first—Tony, the forensics?”

Tony Newman slid from his perch and stood up. He scratched the back of his head and gazed at the ceiling, blinking hard.

“The lekis have been all over the mess with the finetooth proverbial,” he said, “and Bomb Squad haven't found any other devices—or any parcel bomb packaging, as Shonagh said. They're still searching the rubble, and in the meantime are concentrating on tracing the origin of the explosives from the fingerprint of the batch. We're focusing on the DNA traces—we have dozens of molecular samples in the lab, as well as the gross, uh, bits down in pathology. I mean, it's not like we have any difficulty in determining cause of death per se. But in another sense we don't have a lot to go on—we've identified significant DNA traces from twenty-two people so far, other than Murphy himself, the lady from the flat above—Ms. Bernadette White, who was, I understand, the priest's housekeeper—and the postie.”

“The deceased had a lot of visitors?” asked Ferguson. “How's that?”

“He held meetings in the flat,” said Hutchins. “Apparently it functioned as a church. Sergeant Carr's officers are attempting to compile a list of regular churchgoers, for interviews and DNA samples.”

“That shouldn't be hard,” said Ferguson.

“It might be harder than you think,” said Carr. “Churchgoers tend to keep a low profile about their, uh, practices. And we can't demand DNA samples off them.”

“Make an appeal for them all to come forward,” said Ferguson. He glanced at his leki. “Tab that to the Press Officer, would you?”

“Sure, boss,” said the leki.

“Hutchins, sorry, go on.”

“Patel and Connolly here have been trawling for CCTV from nearby shops, street cameras, et cetera, and of course there's a call out for anyone who's been down that street at all recently to upload their personals to the Police National Artificial Intelligence. It's up on the wiki.”

“More than enough,” said Patel. “Nothing obvious so far, though.”

“Nothing obvious?” said Ferguson, over his shoulder. “We're not looking for
obvious
. Though if you do happen to come across CCTV footage of someone handing the victim a suspect package, please don't hesitate to share it.”

“That's not what I meant, sir,” said Patel, looking abashed. “We ran everything through the PNAI search algorithms in the past hour, and nothing jumped out. We'll arrange for them to be eyeballed this afternoon, and we're heading out ourselves to work down the street.”

“OK,” said Ferguson, settling back. “Sorry, again, Shonagh.”

“Which brings us to the question of suspects,” said Hutchins, as though there had been no interruption. “Of course the uniformed officers are interviewing neighbours and witnesses and, ah, parishioners if they can find any, and as DI Ferguson has said, we can't say this in public, but I think we'd all agree that there is very likely more to this than some criminal or personal dispute. And, so far, nothing at all has come up. Correct?”

Patel and Connolly nodded in unison.

“Early days yet,” said Carr. “Early hours, come to that.”

“Well, yes,” said Hutchins. “DCI Mukhtar, I believe you have some lines of inquiry?”

Mukhtar separated himself from the back wall and made his way to the front.

“If I may,” he said.

Hutchins stepped aside. At Ferguson's nod, she resumed her seat.

“There are a few possibilities here,” said Mukhtar, laser-pointing a snarled-up area of lines and labels on the whiteboard. “Let me start by saying that there has been no ‘chatter,’ no advance uptick in messages between people of interest. We still have a few, you know. I will take these in ascending order
of probability. First, Islamists. The known remnants of such groups are all overseas now, mostly stuck in the middle of nowhere, and have no recent record of expressed hostility to Christians, other than in local and essentially ethnic disputes. Even these are rare, deeply obscure, and tangentially if at all related to the Catholic Church, particularly so far away. Insofar as they pay attention to anything in the West at all, the focus of their ire tends to be Jews, apostates—that's secular Muslims—and atheists, which for them means secular just-about-anyone-else.

“Second, anti-Catholic Christians of one kind or another. I know we tend to think of post-apocalyptic cults as an American problem, but the Left Behind crowd do have a handful of adherents even in Scotland, and more of course in England. When these types go violent, however, they incline to siege-stroke-hostage situations or spree killings, not bombings. Which brings us to the second kind of anti-Catholic Christian—the original kind: Protestants. You can look all this up, DC Patel, or consult DC Connolly afterwards. But at this moment I would appreciate your undivided attention…Thank you. Now. Protestants, hm. The only grievances there arise out of the Irish connection, or
lack
of connection, you might say. But there again, with the Ulster hard men it's a bit like the old Islamists—few remain, and those who do have other and closer targets than a priest in Edinburgh. Frankly, we haven't seen any violence from extreme Loyalists for years. No more rackets, y'see, and damn’ little political motivation left.” Mukhtar sighed and spread his hands, sounding almost regretful as he went on. “Not even in connection with the hard-line Unionist element in Scotland. We'll inquire in that direction, of course, but I doubt that we'll find anything.

“So I think we're more likely to find the perpetrators among the militant anti-religious—small groups committed to actively attacking religion, rather than ignoring it. Some of them are the much-dwindled remnants of, or splinters from, bodies that played a serious and significant role during the Second Enlightenment—secularist societies, ad hoc campaigns dealing with particular abuses, and so forth. There's a bit of an overlap there with grudge groups among Faith War veterans, obviously a matter of interest in this context. Other anti-Christian active elements are currents in the darker side of goth subculture—Gnostics, pagans, Satanists. The individuals we in the Branch intend to investigate first are those who've expressed personal grievances against the Catholic Church or its clergy and who've threatened revenge.”

“Do you have names?” asked Ferguson.

“A few,” said Mukhtar.

“Excuse me,” said Sergeant Dennis Carr, “but all the kiddie-fiddling priests and child-thrashing nuns were smoked out years ago. I can't see how anyone with personal grievances against the clergy could be young. Not these days.”

“I didn't say they were,” said Mukhtar. “Many in the subcultures I mentioned aren't young at all. Some are as old as I am! Besides, there are grievances against the clergy other than child abuse. Some people blame religion for whatever's gone wrong in their lives. Usually sex is involved, but not necessarily any abuses of that nature suffered at the hands of priests.”

“I take it,” said Ferguson, “that someone has checked the name of Father Liam Murphy on the database of the Vatican Occupation Authority?”

“Naturally,” said Mukhtar. “He came through the purges without a stain on his character. That's why I suspect some political or sectarian motive, rather than personal.”