Night Sessions, The (6 page)

“OK,” said Ferguson, standing up and moving to the front again. “Thank you, everyone. I need hardly say that if DCI Mukhtar is correct, we need to find the perpetrator quickly. In fact, even if he's wrong. Carry on, keep the situation page updated, liaise with each other, report to me, and let's get this bastard nailed.” He looked around. “Dennis, you have a question?”

“I was wondering,” said Carr, “if we shouldn't offer police security to other priests? Locally, that is.”

“Out of the question,” said Ferguson. “Even if we had the resources, which we don't, we don't even know who the clergy
are
. No official cognisance, remember?”

Carr nodded. Mukhtar smiled and looked sly.

“And I'm not breaking firewalls to find out,” Ferguson added. “As to what we tell the media…” He glanced over at Skulk. “Perhaps we should put it like this. We're treating this as a murder inquiry. There is a slim possibility that the motive was anti-religious hostility, so other clergy, Catholic or otherwise, should be vigilant. Plus the usual appeals.”

“Got it,” said the leki.

“What about our other investigations?” asked DS Hutchins. “The Leith Water business?”

“I need priorities,” added Carr.

“I'll get back to you,” said Ferguson. “That's all for now.” He turned around to study the board. Behind him everyone but Skulk filed out.

Ferguson returned to his office with Skulk at about three p.m. When he turned on his phone clip he found eight messages in his voicemail, and fifteen emails on his desk slate. Half of them were from above, demanding with
increasing urgency that he get the Easter Road case sorted out fast; half from below, pleading other urgent work.

“Give me an update,” said Ferguson, sitting down and looking reluctantly at a notepad and a wad of forms. “What do we have to put on the back burner if we prioritise this?”

Skulk patched a task tree to Ferguson's desk slate. Ferguson poked about in it for a bit. “A” Division of Lothian and Borders Police currently had two other active murder investigations: one street stabbing from five days earlier, one domestic bludgeoning from last night. There were the usual traffic accidents, assaults, thefts. And then there was the investigation that he and Hutchins, Patel and Connolly had been working on for weeks: some thuggery arising out of a conflict between a local security company, Hired Muscle, and the Gazprom goons down at Leith Water. Gazprom hadn't been happy with Hired Muscle's security on the docks, citing pilfering and (in a typical Russian ploy, Ferguson reckoned) sabotage of crated space-industry components from the defence company Rosoboroneksport on trans-shipment to Turnhouse and thence to the Atlantic Space Elevator. Gazprom's own security staff had taken up the business dispute in the manner likewise typical of capitalism with Russian characteristics—with tire irons.

Ferguson called up his immediate boss, DCI Frank McAuley, and repeated the question.

“Everything,” McAuley said.

At five p.m. Professor Grace Abounding Mazvabo saved her day's work and leaned away from her desk, flexing her shoulders. The day's work wasn't really over—she had stacks of admin and grading still to do, and her book in any time left over—but the ritual was important. She switched on the kettle that stood on the windowsill and gazed out while waiting for it to boil. From her cramped and cluttered office in the top floor of New College on the Mound she had one of the best views in Edinburgh, facing north across the railway lines and Princes Street Gardens, over the towers of New New Town to the Firth and beyond it to Fife. As perks of a job went, this wasn't bad, even if it was the job's only perk.

The kettle boiled. Grace made herself a mug of instant coffee and sat back down, flipping her desk screen to the
Edinburgh Evening News
. She took in the headline and set down her mug with a bang and a hot splash.

BOMB PRIEST “MURDERED”

As she read the text, animated the photos, and listened to the little talking heads, Grace Mazvabo had her mouth to the back of her hand long after the slight scald had faded. And besides her grief and wrath, which were in truth not much greater than she usually felt at the murder of a stranger, she identified a sharper pang of guilt. The first thought that had flashed across her mind when she'd read the headline was:
Oh dear Lord, it's started
. She was guilty because she had been uneasy for some time about what might have just started, and she hadn't warned anyone, because…because, well…she was embarrassed to explain it to herself, let alone to anyone else.

She picked up the now cool mug in the fingertips of both hands, propped her elbows, sipped, gazed at the screen and examined her conscience. There was no evidence to support her suspicion. The police weren't pointing a finger. No claim of responsibility had been made. The victim was from the very base of the Catholic hierarchy. Blameless, obscure, well-liked—he couldn't have been more stupidly chosen, assuming he
had
been chosen. The action had been heedless of collateral damage, its secondary victims even more innocent in the world's eyes than the dead man. If this was what Grace dreaded to seriously suspect, the victim's symbolic value was the perverse opposite of what she'd have expected. Perhaps the pointlessness of it was the point.
There is none righteous, no, not one
…

Wait. No. Surely not. Surely, surely not. They couldn't be that crazy. She was running ahead of herself. She stood up and stepped over to a metal filing cabinet and retrieved a cardboard file. She leafed through its contents, slid it back in the divider and banged the drawer shut.

Oh yes
, Grace thought.
They could be that crazy
.

She still hesitated to go to the police. Not without something more than this dark suspicion. Not when the consequences could be so bad for the Church—for all the Churches, and all the believers.

But she couldn't do nothing. After thinking for some time, she sighed, tapped twice behind her ear, and spoke to the Bishop of St. Andrews.

“Cornelius? Can you give my erectus a lift?”

Cornelius Vermuelen let a smirk fade before he shouted back.

“Sure, J. R. No problem.”

He rounded the corner of Waimangu Visitors’ Centre and made his way to the workshop shed at the back. Its garage-type door was open, the entrance partly blocked by the head and upper neck of an animatronic apatosaurus. Tools were clipped and shelved on the walls. John Richard Campbell was stooped over a worktop in the middle of the floor. On the worktop lay the torso of a humanoid robot, its dark hairy skin folded away from the small of its back, the overlapping steel plates of the lumbar region removed and laid to one side. Campbell's hands moved delicately within the cavity. The robot's microcephalic head, its small brow creased, watched the procedure from a nearby shelf. Beside it on the shelf was a less convincing, and quite inanimate, beetle-browed and prognathous prosthesis. The head had been crudely adapted to fit this mask: its facial features were human, albeit with a skin somewhat worn and mottled, but the cranium was about half the human size, with a heavy brow ridge.

Campbell glanced up.

“Won't be a minute,” he said.

Vermuelen knew better than to believe him. So, by the look that crossed its features, did the robot. Vermuelen sidled over to it, keeping out of Campbell's daylight.

“Back problem?” he said.

The head moved as if trying to nod. “Yes,” it said. “Stripped a gear in my lumbar hinge. Fucking baraminologists.”

“Language,” chided Campbell, not looking up.

“From the Hebrew,” explained the robot head, wilfully misunderstanding. “
Bara min
, meaning ‘created kind,’ a very flexible taxon indeed.”

“I don't quite follow,” said Vermuelen. “What have creationist taxonomists got to do with your back?”

“A few weeks ago,” said the head, “they reclassified my kind from ‘fully human post-Diluvial local variety’ to ‘extinct large-brained ape.’ Some little
dipshit at the Institute had done a lit review and decided that the bones of the type specimen weren't definitively associated with the stone tools found in the same horizon of the same fucking dig. And furthermore, that the fossil's cervical vertebrae and pelvis weren't well enough preserved to justify giving me an upright stance. So suddenly I've got to start shambling around like a half-shut knife, swinging my arms and grunting. It's demeaning, I tell you. And it's done my back in. I expect my neck will be next.”

“Your neck's fine,” said Campbell. “Just keep applying the WD-40.”

He reached to an oil-filled saucer for a large ball bearing, held it up between thumb and middle finger as if it were a plum he was about to pop in his mouth, and dropped it into the cavity. He made a few turns with a screwdriver, then with a socket wrench.

“Give it a go,” he said.

The headless prone body made a couple of humping motions.

“Feels all right,” said the head, in a grudging tone.

Campbell replaced the array of plates, squirted WD-40 over them, and flattened the skin back into place. The tip of his tongue protruded as he Super-Glued the flap's incisions. He stood back.

“OK,” he said.

The body stood up, walked to the shelf, and placed its head back on. Clunking sounds came from it as various bolts and cables re-established their connections. Campbell tightened a couple of screws at the throat and nape. With visible reluctance, the robot pulled on the prosthesis. Hair hid the join. The ape-like features twitched this way and that, as the simulated face within grimaced its way back into control of the mask.

“Thanks,” the robot said. It turned to Vermuelen, its ape eyelids blinking mechanically. “Pardon me, I don't believe we've been introduced. I'll be forgetting my own head next.”

The outstretched hand was long-fingered, hairy, leathery.

“Cornelius Vermuelen, park ranger.”

“Piltdown, fake apeman. Pleased to meet you.” It gazed around the shed, as if it would miss the place. “Oh well, back into character. Ook ook.”

Piltdown leaned forward, knuckles almost brushing the floor, ambled to the doorway, patted the apatosaur and turned to look pleadingly at the two men, like a dog waiting for a walk. Campbell put away his tools in a toolcase and straightened up, rubbing his own neck and back.

“Oh well,” he said. “Time to get into character ourselves, I suppose. Bow down in the house of Rimmon.”

Vermuelen chuckled and nodded. He and Campbell both despised the creationist operators of the park, though from opposite directions. Vermuelen had been an Anglican since childhood and a park ranger all his working life. He'd been forty when the Genesis Institute, funded by several wealthy exiled US businessmen, had taken over the lease on the tourist side of the running of Waimangu. In the past five years he hadn't given the creationists an inch: he'd prevented them from cluttering the spectacular volcanic valley with more than a handful of their animatronic dinosaur and caveman installations, and when guiding tourists along the trail had refused to follow the creationists’ script, which claimed that the ancient appearance of this lush, recent landscape could be generalised into evidence for a 6000-year-old Earth. Instead, he had always emphasised that the effect of weathering and revegetation on compacted volcanic ash was no model at all for the geology of igneous and sedimentary rock, remarkable though the appearance of a stable landscape and mature ecosystem in less than two centuries might be.

John Richard Campbell carried, Vermuelen had sometimes thought, a very different cross, one that was all his own, and of his own making. Tall, sinewy, cerebrotonic, autodidactic, and stubborn, at the age of twenty-two he had already managed to get himself excluded from two of the local fundamentalist sects. The first, the Church of his baptism, the Presbyterian Reformed Church of New Zealand, had withdrawn its fellowship from him in his seventeenth year. In a flush of youthful enthusiasm, Campbell had submitted an article to the Church's magazine which argued (with impeccable biblical references) that the Earth was flat, and that its glaringly apparent sphericity could be explained (with incomprehensible but irrefutable mathematics) by a providential divine curvature of the space around it. Accidentally leaked to the Internet before publication, “The Creation of Apparent Shape: a Biblical and Scientific Perspective” had brought upon the Church some worldly scoffing, much to Campbell's chagrin. His dismay and repentance were real enough, but his refusal to repudiate the article, and his indignant denial that his intention had been satirical—the admission of which would have been sufficient to get him off with a warning—had brought down on his head a charge of contumacy. Not being a communicant, he couldn't be excommunicated, but he had found the disapproval and disgrace hard to bear.

To avoid contention, Campbell had transferred his attendance to the even smaller Congregational Baptist Apostolic Church of North Island, Aotearoa, whose meeting house was conveniently or providentially close to the technical college in Rotorua where Campbell had just begun a diploma course in robotic
engineering. His fingers having been burned once, he'd kept his thoughts to himself for a couple of years. But the temptation to speculative theology had been too much to resist, and had become once more his undoing. An earnest piece on his personal website imploring evangelical concern for the souls of Turing-test-passing robots and other artificial intelligences had come to the pastor's attention, and that was that. The charge this time was heresy. He did not contest it.

A less self-assured man might have become bitter. Campbell had taken the view that theological debate was pointless: all that needed to be said had been said already, and said better, by Augustine, Calvin, and the Reformers. He graduated from college unchurched and uncertain of his future. From his earlier escapade he'd already concluded that scientific creationism was a misguided attempt to convince an unbelieving world on its own terms, but it was the creationist science park at Waimangu that had brought him his vocation. He was recruited to the park's staff because of his engineering skills, but was privately contemptuous of its operators for presuming to offer evidence for God's Word. His own view was what he called the strong delusion theory. This held that, while creation was evident on the surface of the world, deeper investigations were doomed to distortion by man's spiritual darkness.

This gloomy view had seemed to Vermuelen to fit Campbell's personality when he'd first started working at the park, but the young man had brightened up remarkably after a visit to Scotland about a year ago. Campbell never said much about it, but his few guarded comments indicated that he'd encountered people in Scotland who shared some of his odd views. Vermuelen reckoned this was likely to be a mixed blessing in the long run, but for now he was just grateful that his colleague's natural cheerfulness had come out from the shadow of his eccentric theology.

Campbell slammed and locked the shed door, and hefted his toolcase. The two men and the robot made their way to Vermuelen's jeep, parked on a side road in front of the visitors’ centre. The first coach party of the day had arrived, queuing for the VR frames that overlaid their views of the valley with elaborate scenes of Edenic and Noachic life, far more detailed, crowded and fanciful than the animatronic displays. The crowd—from an Indonesian cruise liner, Vermuelen guessed—nudged each other and pointed at Piltdown, who posed for video and waved back a few times before clambering into the middle seat of the jeep.

“You buckle up too,” said Vermuelen, taking the wheel.

The robot fumbled, awkward with its simian digits. Campbell leaned over and clicked the seat belt.

Vermuelen drove up a small slope. From the top he could see all the way down the valley, its forested slopes obscured here and there by morning mist, a more persistent steam rising from the hot lakes and streams in the chill September spring morning. The pale blue of Frying Pan Lake and the garish azure of Inferno Crater glittered through the trees far below. Beyond the valley, on the horizon, stood Mount Tarawera, the chasm left by the 1886 eruption still visible on its flank. Vermuelen lurched the vehicle over the hump and then onto the road, six winding miles downhill to the lake. He flicked the car radio on to catch the nine o’clock news.

The lead item was that a priest had been blown up in Scotland. The Scottish police, it was reported, weren't talking about terrorism. The experts polled by the news station more than made up for this. Vermuelen clicked the radio off after five minutes.

“Grim,” he said.

“Yes,” said Campbell. “But it shouldn't surprise us. The anti-Christian fanatics will never stop, that's the problem. Even the apostate states don't satisfy them. It's not enough to drive religion out of public life. They'll go after those who believe and practise in private too.”

“Well,” said Vermuelen, anxious to head off one of Campbell's predictable rants, “at least we live in a free country.”

This was not quite how he felt about the past decade or two of influx of fundamentalist refugees—as they called themselves—from the US and former UK to New Zealand. Aside from his personal resentment of the indignities and mendacities of the park, the exiles formed a distorting lobby in NZ politics, and their frequent plots and occasional forays against their former homeland were a strain on the local security services, as well as on diplomatic and trade relations with the diminished but still-mighty United States.

“For now,” said Campbell. “We need to be on our guard.”

“Hmm,” said Vermuelen, concentrating on the driving.

Campbell sat in silence for a few moments. The silence didn't last.

“Are you still attending that Erastian shrine of syncretist idolatry?”

Vermuelen had to laugh, but he felt offended.

“Yes,” he said stiffly. “I still go to St. Faith's.” He glanced over at Campbell, who stared fixedly ahead. “And you know, J. R., I think you should, too. It is after all the means of grace.”

Campbell sighed. “I miss fellowship, I admit. But the Apostle tells us to flee from idolatry. I will not compromise on that.”

No, you won't, thought Vermuelen.

St. Faith's, the Anglican church in Rotorua, was distinguished by the fine Maori carving of its pews and pulpit, and by a window etched with a translucent, sandblasted depiction of Christ in a Maori warrior's cloak, apparently walking on the water of Lake Rotorua outside. Campbell had often inveighed against all this as a sinful compromise with heathen darkness, a betrayal even worse than the Episcopalian Church government and doctrinal latitudinarianism that made up his more general objection to the Anglican communion.

“Nevertheless,” continued Campbell, “St. Faith's is the most visible church in the area. If the anti-Christians are resorting to murder in Scotland, who knows what might be in store for all of us? Even here?”

“I think that's in the hands of God and the police.”

“Very true,” said Campbell. “All the same, the police can't watch everything. It might be wise to keep an eye out for strangers in the congregation. Let me know if you notice any.”